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# 



From a Daguerreotype taken in 1855 


AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 


From My Touth Up 

Personal Reminiscences 

By 

MARGARET E. SANGSTER 

« i 


ILLUSTRATED 



> > 


New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 


Copyright, 1909, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



©Ou^.17. 

Cl A 2447 59 

AU 3 17 1909 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Streiet 


the dear circle of my 
kindred y 

my old schoolmates , and 
my friends , near and far , 
this book is affectionately 
inscribed 



CONTENTS 


I. 

By Way of Introduction 

ii 

II. 

Birth and Early Years . 

1 8 

III. 

Our Home Sabbaths 

29 

IV. 

My Mother 

4 i 

V. 

Common Days and Gala Days . 

57 

VI. 

The Home Library .... 

70 

VII. 

Old Friends 

84 

VIII. 

Passaic Seminary .... 

96 

IX. 

A Schoolgirl in the Fifties . 

hi 

X. 

My French Professor 

123 

XI. 

Dreams and Fancies 

135 

XII. 

The First Great Grief . 

148 

XIII. 

Hints of the Coming Storm . 

164 

XIV. 

In War Days 

1 77 

XV. 

The Close of the War, and the 
Death of Lincoln 

192 

XVI. 

A Southern Town in the Recon- 
struction Period .... 

206 

XVII. 

My Literary Masters 

221 

XVIII. 

The Happiest Days 

236 

XIX. 

New Adjustments .... 

247 

XX. 

The Day’s Work .... 

7 

258 


8 


CONTENTS 


XXI. The Life of an Editor . . . 268 

XXII. Pen Portraits 283 

XXIII. As Mother Confessor . . . 294 

XXIV. An Ideal Bible Class . . . 304 

XXV. Friends all Along the Line . .314 


XXVI. The Touch of Time . . . 324 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


Facing page 

From a Daguerreotype Taken in 1855 . . Title 

From a Photograph Taken in Norfolk, Vir- 
ginia, 1868 

From a Photograph Taken in 1880 

The Children’s Friend 

From a Photograph Taken in 1890 
On the Veranda, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 


247 
258 
260 1/ 
268 


1905 

Margaret E. Sangster 


294 

324 


9 


From My Youth Up 


i 

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

T HE question may easily be asked, 
“ Why venture outside the seclusion 
of the home and the intimacy of 
personal friendship, with a book of reminis- 
cences ?” The answer is twofold. Many 
friends have made the suggestion that the 
story of a literary career, if simply and 
frankly told, may be helpful to others. 
They have been the more urgent on this 
score for the reason that whatever meas- 
ure of success has been mine, I have never 
laid aside for an hour or a day my respon- 
sibility to the home and hearth, and my 
caretaking of little domestic affairs. Such 
work as I have done has concerned itself 
chiefly with home life and with helping tired 
folk to take fresh courage and bear their 
burdens cheerily and without complaint. It 
11 


12 


FJEtOM MY YOUTH UP 


has been my wish all along to show the op- 
portunities that come to those in obscure 
places, who take the days one by one, and 
use them each as a gift from a loving Father. 
The day’s work and the day’s wage, truth, 
valour, love and service, what better things 
than these can we hope to gain ? 

The egotism of the book will be pardoned 
if it is observed that I am trying to give 
honour to the true hearts of those to whom I 
owe whatever I have been able to accomplish 
as author and home-maker. My life of 
author and editor did not begin until I had 
passed my earliest youth. 

It is evident to the most casual spectator 
that amazing progress has been made in 
applied science and useful inventions since 
the middle of the nineteenth century. I 
was a schoolgirl in the fifties. In my 
childhood we were strangers to most of the 
conveniences that are now the common- 
places of every-day use. We made our own 
candles, and our neighbours did the same. 
We folded our letters in such a way that a 
place was left for the address, and we fastened 
them with wafers or sealing wax. I well re- 
member the delight with which I first used 
an envelope. Photography was in its infancy 


BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 


13 


when I was ten. As for the laying of a cable 
under the Atlantic, a marvel that was al- 
most accomplished in the year that I was 
a bride, the thought of it would have been re- 
garded as the dream of a visionary in the year 
that I was born. Advances have been made 
everywhere, in surgery, in hygiene, in rapid 
transit, in the carrying of messages around 
the globe, in postal facilities, in pictorial il- 
lustration, since the time of my childhood. 
We are living in a wonderful century, and 
are in peril of forgetting that the century just 
behind it was also wonderful and splendid. 
That century laid the foundation for this, 
and it is the due of those who wrought 
well and bravely therein that they should 
not be overlooked. The education given 
young women in my day differed in certain 
details from that which they now receive; 
but it was not less thorough, less practical, 
nor less available in fitting students for the 
future. 

I have been in touch for the years of one 
generation with people all over this land, 
writing candidly and freely to thousands 
whose faces I shall never see, replying to 
their letters and acting the part of adviser in 
general to my countrywomen. This is why, 


14 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


yielding to pressure from without, I have 
written this book. 

My life has been a busy one. It has been 
lived intensely in the present moment. Close 
application, vivid impressions of the thing in 
hand, and little space for glancing backward 
or looking forward, have been its character- 
istics. “ How do you continue to keep in 
touch with young women?” I was asked the 
other day. I answered, “ By thinking noth- 
ing about the difference between their age 
and mine. I probably feel younger to-day 
than some of the girls for whom I write.” 

It has been a new experience to sit down 
with deliberate intention and recall past days. 
If one is to build a house, she must lay a 
foundation ; to plant a garden, she must sew 
her seeds. So my story must begin, a little 
abruptly, with childhood. Each of us comes 
into the world, new and untried, yet 
freighted with tendencies and traits from 
those who have gone before. We hark back 
to the generations behind us, we are like our 
parents and grandparents, and so, to talk 
about ourselves intelligently, we must also 
talk about our forbears. This is why I have 
spent so much time over the roseate period 
of preparation and growth. 


BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 


15 


Are our ways determined by accident or 
Providence ? You and I say the latter, and 
we believe it, yet apparent accidents are 
often the means providentially used to 
shape our ends. I was sitting years ago on 
a wide veranda, with an outlook over a shin- 
ing river. It was early summer, and the roses 
were in bloom. A battle-ship was anchored 
not far away and a band on its deck began to 
play, “ My Country, ’tis of Thee.” Out of 
space, a winged thought floated into my 
mind, and I wrote in pencil a bit of verse, 
called “ Are the Children at Home ? ” I sent 
it on a venture to my favourite Atlantic 
Monthly and the editor, Mr. William Dean 
Howells, accepted and published it. This 
poem had an instant success. It was copied 
widely on the other side of the ocean, as 
well as here, was read on platforms, and 
brought me requests for other work from 
various periodicals. The fifteen dollars paid 
for it seemed larger to me than checks for 
much greater amounts have seemed since. 

Two or three years later, I wrote a short 
story. I have never written stories with 
much facility, but this one came from my 
heart, inspired by resentment against a wrong 
that had not been redressed. This sketch I 


16 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


sent flying to The Independent, and Oliver 
Johnson accepted it by return mail, with the 
words, “ If you can write like this, let me see 
other stories as often as you please.” Young 
aspirants understand that this was great 
luck, and furnished a real incentive to further 
effort. 

I began then, being yet on the sunny side 
of thirty, to drop an essay or a lyric into the 
post-box at the street corner, saying so lit- 
tle about what I was doing that my family 
did not dream of my new ambition. In the 
progress of my narrative, I shall tell how 
other accidental impulses paved the path 
for what was to be my chief employment 
during many of my working years. 

Add to enjoyment in writing, an omnivo- 
rous and keen appetite for books, and almost 
unbroken health, with a choice of oppor- 
tunities, and it is easy to see how my life, 
grew into literary lines. There is every- 
thing in pegging away. I have never 
stopped. In forty years I have not had so 
much as a four weeks , vacation at any single 
time. 

I am hopeful that my younger friends, who 
number thousands, will find an interest in 
my frank revelations and will do whatever 


BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 


17 


they attempt with both hands, and all their 
heart, thinking less of the wage than of the 
work. 

As I think of the friends I have known, 
and the gladness I have shared, I am full of 
gratitude. The hope I have as I close this 
chapter is that the pages to follow may for 
every reader add something to the joy of life. 


II 

BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS 

I WAS born on February 22, 1838, at 
New Rochelle, New York. The night 
was wild with snow and bitter gales, 
and the old farmhouse that had been a 
tavern during the Revolution was buried 
deep in drifts and rocked in the wintry storm. 
December and January that year had been 
unusually mild, but February came roaring 
in like a lion, and the inclement weather did 
not cease until March was nearly over. 

The room in which I spent my first three 
months had to me later the fantastic distinc- 
tion of having been used by the Hessians, who 
at one time were quartered there, as a place 
for their nightly revels. I plumed myself 
through my childhood cn having Washing- 
ton’s birthday for mine and on having slept 
in an old mahogany cradle that was an heir- 
loom in the family, in the very room where 
part of the British Army had made merry 
and the burly Hessians had danced. 

Children are odd little beings, and they 
18 


BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS 


19 


do not reveal all their secrets to older folk. 
In my earliest studies of history, derived 
largely from Peter Parley, I took sides with 
intense enthusiasm with the Colonies and 
against King George, but I can remember in 
the background of my mind a lurking sym- 
pathy with the Hessian contingent who were 
paid to serve under England’s flag and who 
must sometimes have had homesick hours in 
that room where I was born. 

My father and mother had each been 
married before, and there was a son of each 
former marriage living in the home at the 
time of my birth. I was to both the first 
daughter, and very welcome. My mother 
had passionately longed for her little woman- 
child. A sister and two brothers followed me. 

Mrs. Oliphant, in her autobiography, has 
vividly described the delight felt by her 
mother at her arrival. I can well under- 
stand those pages of hers, for never princess 
of the realm brought to any palace or to any 
queen greater joy than I did to the mother 
who had prayed that God would give her a 
daughter. 

The name Margaret was my natural in- 
heritance, as I was the fifth to bear it in suc- 
cessive generations. Both the brothers who 


20 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


were in the house when I came to it, a wee 
little maid, were destined to leave it before 
very long. My elder brother, my father’s 
only child by his first marriage, was then 
grown to young manhood, and he soon 
availed himself of a business opening in the 
South, went to Virginia, and there married 
and remained as a resident. During my 
childhood and girlhood he occasionally vis- 
ited us, and his letters to me when I grew 
old enough for correspondence were a con- 
stant delight. The younger brother who 
was my mother’s son, all that was left to her 
of the first sweet romance of her youth, died 
after a short illness when I was still little 
more than an infant. 

This life of mine through my parents 
reaches back over a long stretch of years. 
My father, John Munson, was born in Eng- 
land in 1786, but spent most of his boyhood 
in County Armagh, Ireland, where his 
father had business interests. At eighteen 
the lad emigrated to Canada. In his early 
manhood he made for himself a place in New 
York. His name stands, with that of other 
well-known citizens, in a directory of New 
York published in 1810. 

My mother, whose people were Scotch, was 


BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS 


21 


the eldest child of Thomas and Margaret 
Chisholm, and was born in New York in 
1806. Her parents died when she was ten 
years old, the one quickly following the 
other to the grave. She was the eldest of 
four children, and the little orphaned brood 
were brought up in the home of their grand- 
father, David Kirkaldy. 

My father’s people were Wesleyan Meth- 
odists, my mother’s Covenanters of the most 
austere type. One of my dearest recollec- 
tions of him is connected with his walking 
about the house on the Sabbath morning (we 
never said Sunday then) a beatific look on his 
face, while from time to time he would sing 
snatches of his favourite hymns. Two that 
I have never forgotten are 

“ Begone unbelief, my Saviour is near, 

And for my relief He will surely appear. 

By prayer let me wrestle, and He will perform : 

With Christ in the vessel I smile at the storm.” 

The other, sung to a lilting measure, was 

“How happy are they 
Who their Saviour obey, 

And have laid up their treasure above. 

O, what tongue can express 
The sweet comfort and bliss 
Of a soul in its earliest love ! ” 

My mother, brought up to feel that silence 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


befitted the Lord's Day, would try to put 
her foot on the soft pedal, and say, “ I 
wouldn't sing quite so loudly, John," but 
she could not repress his mercurial spirit, 
nor keep him from showing the rollicking 
mood that coloured even his piety. Opti- 
mistic, cheery, effervescent, perhaps over- 
sanguine, an idealist and a dreamer, my 
father lives in my memory as the most 
charming, spontaneous, and altogether de- 
lightful of men. He subdued his Methodist 
fervour to the severer dignity of Presbyte- 
rianism when he married my mother, twenty 
years his junior, but the kindling flame was 
always there, ready to break into fire at a 
touch. It was characteristic that when they 
married he joined her church and did not 
ask her to unite with his. 

During my first seven years the family 
connection was with the denomination 
known as Reformed Presbyterian. We at- 
tended a church in Sullivan Street, New 
York, for New Rochelle had been left when 
I was three, and our minister was the Rev. 
James Christie, D. D. I can recollect going 
to church I suppose almost from babyhood. 
I am sure I was never left at home after my 
little feet had learned to walk. 


BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS 


23 


The recollections of early childhood are 
fragmentary, but mine go back to hours in 
the firelight when I sat on my father’s knee 
and he made shadow pictures on the wall with 
cunning devices of a handkerchief held in his 
hand, and told stories that sank deep into the 
childish memory. The stories were a curious 
jumble. They included ^Esop’s fables, fairy 
stories such as “ Hop O 9 My Thumb/' 
“ Beauty and the Beast,” “ Cinderella,” and 
“ Red Ridinghood,” and Bible stories that 
my father related with rare dramatic art. I 
learned of Abraham offering up Isaac, of 
Jacob dreaming with a stone for a pillow 
while the angels went to and fro between 
earth and heaven, of Joseph sold into Egypt, 
of Samuel, and David, and Daniel, from the 
lips of a story-teller who related each tale in 
a fashion so picturesque that the attention of 
little listeners never flagged. He told his 
children other stories, too, charming recollec- 
tions of his early life and of a favourite uncle 
who was eccentric and original with a talent 
for making verses and playing the violin. 

The story of an experience my father had 
as a lonely lad in Canada made a deep im- 
pression on his children, and we often asked 
for it as a good-night treat. I do not know 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


24 

in what province he lived. It might have 
been either Ontario or Quebec or anywhere. 
In my thought the location is a myth. Very 
likely at the time of the telling geograph- 
ical lines were of little importance to a 
juvenile audience, but here is the sketch 
as I see it before me now : The boy was 
living with kindred on a farm, and neigh- 
bours were few and far between. He had 
hours of yearning for those he had left 
beyond the sea. He had crossed the Atlantic 
in a sailing vessel, and it had taken more 
than a month for the voyage. The home- 
land seemed at an interminable distance, but 
he did not care to show those around him 
that he pined for its voices and its scenes. 
Therefore, he would go by himself, seeking 
solitude in the woods that he might indulge 
the mood of longing that was often nigh to 
heartache. 

Wandering through the forest on a Sab- 
bath afternoon he discovered as night 
drew on that he had lost his way. Every 
one who has ever had the experience knows 
how baffling and puzzling to the sight 
is an assemblage of trees when there is 
neither path nor clue. The boy found him- 
self more and more uncertain and bewildered, 


BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS 


and as the sun went down he feared that he 
must spend the night alone in the woods. 
He did then what he did always throughout 
his life when in doubt. Kneeling at the foot 
of a tree he asked the Father above to care 
for His child and lead him safe back to the 
house he had left. Rising, he heard the 
faint tinkle of a cow-bell, and the sweet sound 
guided him out of the forest and back to the 
hearth. If it has been my lifelong habit 
simply to carry every little thing to God, I 
have to thank my father for this and other 
object-lessons in faith in my earliest days. 

I was the eldest of four children in our 
home. Of the four I am the only survivor. 
My mother taught us all to read, and it may 
surprise the young mothers of the present 
day to be told that three of us knew the al- 
phabet by the time we were three years old. 
I could read easy lessons soon after my third 
birthday, and at four was able to read with- 
out the least difficulty any printed page that 
came in my way. Very much as John 
Ruskin’s mother did, my mother used the 
Psalms and the Proverbs in the reading les- 
sons of her little children. My youngest 
brother was the only one of the group who 
did not respond to her gentle efforts, and he 


26 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


was regarded by pitying neighbours as a 
marvel of dullness. He did not learn to 
read until he was past seven. At that age I 
was reading Colonial history and learning 
pages of Peter Parley by heart. 

At six I stood on a platform in a little 
private school taught by my earliest teacher, 
Miss Halstead, and recited without a break a 
speech made in Parliament concerning the 
Stamp Act, by the Earl of Chatham. My 
spelling book had blue covers and bore the 
name, time-honoured and famous, of Noah 
Webster. I had a little red-bound book 
called Swift’s Philosophy, natural not moral 
philosophy, that was my delight. It was in 
the form of questions and answers and dealt 
with practical matters, such as the cooling of 
tea by pouring it out of a cup into a saucer, 
and the disintegration of lumps of sugar by 
dropping them into a tumbler of water. The 
colouring of a glass of water by the addition 
of a drop of ink was another simple experi- 
ment that went with this elementary book. 

I balked at nothing except the multipli- 
cation table, but figures then as now waved 
menacing fingers before my eyes. I was wo- 
fully slow and clumsy in learning to manage 
a pen, and while reading came to me as by 


BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS 


27 


magic, writing was an accomplishment that 
I acquired slowly and with tears. This may 
have been due partly to the fact that I ac- 
quired the rudiments of writing by means of 
slate and pencil. One was permitted to hold 
a pencil in a tight little grasp and might 
guide it as one chose, but when it was a ques- 
tion of writing in a copy-book the pen had 
to be held loosely in the hand, pointing in a 
positive direction while the fingers moved 
gracefully across the page. My teachers 
finally gave up the struggle in despair and 
suffered me to hold the pen in any way I 
liked. Not until then did I learn to write 
legibly, and by that time I was ten. 

In these days of careful kindergarten train- 
ing the mother would be singular who allowed 
her children to begin the three R’s as they 
were called, meaning reading, writing and 
arithmetic, before they had fully emerged 
from the nursery, but we were not excep- 
tional. Most of my little schoolmates started 
in the race as early as I did, and one dear 
child who was my playmate had known her 
letters before she was two. I think we were 
saved from danger to health by the whole- 
some simplicity of our lives. 

Children in my time did not occupy the 


28 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


centre of the stage ; they lived in a happy, 
homely background, and when visitors were 
present were seen and not heard. No child 
in our household felt privileged to force his or 
her affairs on any one’s attention at an incon- 
venient time. As a friend of mine tersely 
puts it, “ The children of our period were 
washed and dressed and put in a corner.” 
In their corner they had plenty of fun and 
abundant freedom, but it was the happy 
freedom that is possible when obedience is so 
much the habit that it is automatic, and 
children look up to parents as infallible. 

A childhood such as mine, free from ill- 
ness, free from responsibility except as to 
little household tasks, made a good starting- 
point for the days which were to come. 


Ill 

OUR HOME SABBATHS 

I HAVE spoken of going to church when 
I was hardly out of infancy. No doubt, 
at first, I spent most of my time in the 
pew with my mother’s arm around me and 
my head against her breast. A nap could 
be taken in the pew as comfortably as on 
the lounge at home. Little hats and wraps 
were removed, and sensible mothers made 
the babies comfortable. They were expected 
not to disturb the congregation by talk- 
ing or moving about, and they early learned 
one of life’s most important lessons — the 
art of sitting still. But sleep was not 
denied them. When a little older I used to 
have a pencil and paper, and during the 
minister’s sermon I could draw pictures or 
print the letters of the alphabet. Later, I 
always had a book, and it has often since 
been a source of surprise that I was never 
chided for reading it during the sermon. 

An incident that was almost an event oc- 
curred in my eighth year. I seldom went to 
29 


30 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


church by myself, but on the occasion referred 
to I had gone to Sunday-school and when it 
was over had slipped from the Sunday-school 
room into the church and taken my place in 
the pew, awaiting the arrival of the rest of the 
household. The Sunday-school was held at 
two in the afternoon, and the church service 
followed. As usual, I seated myself and 
opened my library book. I distinctly re- 
member what it was, a curious book to have 
absorbed the complete attention of a little 
girl of eight. It was the Memoir of Colonel 
Gardener, a man who in his youth was a 
blasphemer, but who was converted after a 
series of strange experiences, becoming 
finally a devoted gospel minister. I read 
straight on page after page for a long time. 

Awakened suddenly with a start to the 
knowledge that I was all alone in the big 
church, I realized that the short winter after- 
noon was drawing to a close, the shadows were 
deepening, there was no familiar form in the 
pulpit, the choir seats were vacant. There 
was nobody in our pew or in any other. One 
solitary child in a blue frock with a little 
blue coat and a hat tied under her chin was 
the sole occupant of the deserted place, and 
she had been reading the Life of Colonel 


OUR HOME SABBATHS 


31 


Gardener with such absorbed interest that 
she had not missed the organ, the voice of the 
preacher, noticed the absence of the congrega- 
tion, or anything connected with the service. 

They used to say when I was a child that 
I was always lost in a book. I certainly 
lost myself in it on that Sabbath afternoon. 
Flying down the aisle with indecorous haste 
I found the great doors shut and locked. 
The horror of the situation can hardly be 
described. I remember calling out, “ Must 
I stay in this dreadful place till I die ? ” 
People passing on the street heard my 
lamentation, the sexton was sent for, and 
the little prisoner was released. The expla- 
nation was that there was no service on that 
particular afternoon, and I had not heard the 
announcement, although no doubt every one 
took it for granted that I had been told. 
The sexton going about to close the church 
had quite overlooked the small maiden 
nestling contentedly over a book in a pew 
half-way down the church. 

At the time of this occurrence we lived in 
Paterson, New Jersey, where much of my 
childhood was passed. We were a migratory 
family. My father had a restless turn, and 
had a fancy for moving on from place to 


32 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


place, making exchanges of real estate, fre- 
quently to the depletion of his resources. 
Thus we moved from New Rochelle to New 
York in my infancy and from New York to 
Paterson at a later period. 

As I have already said, we attended the Re- 
formed Presbyterian Church in New York. I 
am glad of this, for the few years spent there 
abide with me in a series of pictures. I think 
it is Edmund Gosse who in “ Father and 
Son ” speaks of a wild lyrical ballad, called 
the Cameronian’s Dream as a part of the 
literary furnishing of his childhood. I, too, 
remember that poem, beginning 

u In a dream of the night I was wafted away 
To the moorlands of mist where the brave 
martyrs lay,” 

and I have not forgotten the passion of sym- 
pathy that filled my soul when I read those 
flaming lines. 

The services in the Sullivan Street Church, 
New York, were very long, never so long, how- 
ever, as on Communion Sundays. The Lord’s 
Supper was served at narrow tables set between 
the pews and the pulpit, and sometimes ex- 
tending part of the way down the aisle. 
These tables were covered with a white cloth, 


OUR HOME SABBATHS 


33 


and the communicants went to them in 
companies and were addressed, a table at a 
time, by the different ministers present on 
the occasion. There were invariably several 
of these. As the successive companies went 
to take the Sacrament each church-member 
dropped into the hand of an elder a little 
lead token that had been given out at the 
final preparatory service on Saturday even- 
ing. They always went to and returned 
from the table singing the Forty-fifth Psalm 
in Rouse's version. There are seventeen 
couplets. If it happened to be necessary the 
communicants began it again after singing 
the last stanza. I quote a part of it. The 
whole is quaint and rugged and not very 
metrical, but no sacred music has since 
sounded to me so much as if, like that, it 
had caught a note from the hearts of heaven. 
The King's Daughters have adopted the 
Forty-fifth Psalm as their own, and yet prob- 
ably few wearers of the silver cross are famil- 
iar with the verses that I love best in this 
old Psalm of my forefathers. 

“ Behold, the daughter of the King 
All glorious is within ; 

And with embroideries of gold 
Her garments wrought have been. 


34 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


She shall be brought unto the King 
In robes with needle wrought ; 
Her fellow-virgins following 
Shall unto thee be brought. 


“They shall be brought with gladness great, 
And mirth on every side, 

Into the palace of the King, 

And there they shall abide. 

Instead of those thy fathers dear, 

Thy children thou may’st take, 

And in all places of the earth 
Them noble princes make.” 

A feature of the singing that was peculiar to 
the Lord’s Supper was the reading of the 
hymn, two lines at a time, by the minister, 
or four lines, it might be. The congregation, 
all of whom must have known the words by 
heart, sang it after the reading. This may 
have been a custom originally due to the 
hardships of the persecution, when the Cove- 
nanters were forced to worship where they 
could, now in a shepherd’s cot, again in barn 
or byre, or out under the open sky hidden 
among the heather, lest their enemies should 
break up their solemn assemblies. At such 
seasons books might have been encumbran- 
ces and the minister’s voice have taken their 
place. 

The Lord’s Day was very sacredly kept in 


OUR HOME SABBATHS 


35 


our house. On Saturday afternoon toys and 
secular books, every vestige of sewing and 
everything that belonged to the week’s tasks 
were laid aside until Monday. The meals 
for the Sabbath were mainly cooked on Sat- 
urday. Vegetables, previously prepared and 
needing only to be set for a while over the 
fire, were commonly added to the cold roast, 
and tea and coffee were made as usual, but 
there was a minimum of labour on the sacred 
day. We had laid out for us, or we laid out 
ourselves, on Saturday evening, the clothes 
to be worn the next day, and if stitches had 
been neglected they were not taken on Sun- 
day. The garments were worn unmended, 
if there had been forgetfulness or neglect. 

Until I was eighteen it never occurred to 
me to sit beside a front window and look out 
on the street on the Sabbath Day. Our 
library was well stocked with standard books 
of a thoughtful and homiletic description, 
but there were few books in it adapted to 
youthful reading of the sort that our chil- 
dren have without stint. My great standby 
during my childhood for Sunday reading, 
strange as it may seem, was Matthew Henry’s 
Commentary on the Bible. Over the big 
volumes I would linger, finding them any- 


FKOM MY YOUTH UP 


thing but wearisome. The books brought 
home from the Sunday-school library were 
not questioned, and as I recall them they 
were, on the whole, very well chosen. The 
stories were not exciting, and some of them, 
like “ Little Henry and His Bearer,” were 
stepping-stones towards interest in foreign 
missions. 

We recited the Shorter Catechism after 
supper on Sunday evenings, dividing it 
into three parts. The first division compre- 
hended the questions and answers, from 
“ What is the chief end of man ? ” to the 
commandments. The second section with 
the commandments and their accompanying 
questions “ What is required? ” and “ What is 
forbidden ? ” occupied another evening, and 
the third division included all that followed 
after the commandments until the end of the 
Catechism. By continual repetition we as- 
similated the Shorter Catechism until it be- 
came inwrought with the fibres of character. 

Although our Sabbaths were so strictly 
kept they were cheerful and bright, and we 
never dreaded them as dreary, or thought of 
their service as bondage. They were in 
truth the golden clasp of the week. Going 
to church was a weekty festival, charming 


OUR HOME SABBATHS 


37 


from the time we set out as a family, two by 
two, my mother always taking my father’s 
arm, until we came home again the happier 
for having met old friends, some of whom 
often returned with us. Ours was a home of 
hospitality, and the extra cup and plate were 
a matter of course. I can hear, if I close my 
eyes, and let myself drift into the past, the 
minister’s voice as he began the long prayer 
with “ Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Al- 
mighty,” and I recall certain chapters that 
he used to read in cadences that linger with 
me in solemn melody. Sometimes it was 
“ The Lord is my shepherd I shall not 
want ; ” again, “ Let not your heart be 
troubled,” or “ Ho, every one that thirsteth, 
come ye to the waters,” or “ Comfort ye, com- 
fort ye, my people.” 

Once when an old husband and wife had 
died almost together, and their friends were 
plunged into mourning, the child in the pew 
heard the minister read a chapter in Luke 
where the phrase occurs, “ Pray ye that your 
flight be not in the winter.” She still re- 
members how the phrase impressed her with 
a sense of awe. 

We had family worship twice every day ; 
in the morning just after breakfast, and in 


38 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


the evening after supper. It was conducted 
with a little ceremony. My father would 
take the Bible reverently and hold it in his 
hand for a little space. “ I am composing 
my mind,” he would say. He did not read 
the Book in course, either straight through 
the Old or straight through the New Testa- 
ment, as was the pious custom of many, but 
he often read a book at a time. I do not 
mean a book at a sitting. There is a story 
told about Thomas Carlyle that he once read 
the whole Book of Job without stopping 
when asked to lead in worship in a friend’s 
house. A single chapter was usually our 
portion, then a simple prayer, concluding 
with “ Our Father who art in heaven,” re- 
peated in concert. When twice a day the 
family listened to the words of Isaiah and 
John, when over and over they heard the 
Psalms and the Proverbs, when the Bible 
stories and the Bible names were literally 
household words, people in general knew 
their Bibles. 

If family worship could be restored in the 
Christian households of our land, there would 
be less need than now to deplore an increas- 
ing ignorance on the part of the young of our 
beautiful English Bible. It was less possible 


OUR HOME SABBATHS 


39 


half a century ago than now to puzzle college 
students by offering them a list of questions 
on the Bible, some of which are purposely 
misleading. 

My father’s prayers were very direct. 
They were full of thanksgiving. Never did 
they wound the feelings of any one. A 
schoolmate whose father was of a different 
type told me that she and her brothers 
and sisters disliked the evening family 
prayer, because her father took that oppor- 
tunity to review the faults of the children 
in much detail, in the ear of the Lord. In- 
stead of producing the effect he hoped for, a 
contrary result ensued. The children were 
not brought to penitence, but were made 
resentful and rebellious. 

There were homes in which each child re- 
peated a text at family prayer. In one of the 
loveliest Christian homes in which I have 
ever been a guest this custom has been re- 
tained and now the few who are left of the 
brothers and sisters past middle age daily 
repeat a verse from the oldest to the 
youngest, and are then led in prayer. 
Whatever the form taken by family devo- 
tions, the spirit fosters the best realities in 
family life. Daily household prayer links 


40 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


the earthly to the heavenly home, gives in 
fact a new meaning to that wonderful 
phrase of St. Paul, “ the whole family in 
heaven and on earth.” 


IV 


MY MOTHER 

M Y mother was the pervading genius, 
the uncrowned queen, the unques- 
tioned autocrat of my childhood’s 
home. When I read J. M. Barrie’s “ Mar- 
garet Ogilvie,” I was reminded on many a 
page of my own precious mother. Although 
born in New York she was far more through 
her entire life a daughter of Scotland than 
of this country. She possessed the reticence, 
the unswerving fidelity, the simplicity and 
the undaunted courage of the race from 
which she came. In 1806 her father carried 
on a business in marble and stone in that 
part of New York City which has been de- 
nominated Greenwich Village. 

In the Diary of Philip Hone, an old New 
Yorker, the life of that day is vividly por- 
trayed. All the great bustling city that now 
extends so far and makes the home of so 
vast a population, was then non-existent. 
A few houses, a few streets, a few churches 
made up the story of the town. The East 
41 


42 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


River, to-day spanned by bridges, traversed by 
ferries and tunnelled beneath its waves, was 
then crossed in rowboats and sailboats by pas- 
sengers who had errands of business or pleas- 
ure on either of its banks. Fields and farms 
stretched smilingly where to-day are lofty 
buildings twenty stories high. A niece of 
mine riding one day in an electric car in the 
lower part of Broadway asked the conductor 
to stop at Maiden Lane, saying that she did 
not know where it was. An old gentleman 
sitting beside her, with wrinkled hands on a 
gold-headed cane, observed quietly, “ Your 
grandmother knew where Maiden Lane was, 
I am sure.” 

Water was then drawn from wells, and 
wooden pumps stood on street corners. 
Every afternoon at four o'clock a bell was 
heard in the streets and the tea-water man 
stopped at the houses of his customers to 
supply them with pure water for the making 
of tea. I regret that I did not lay up in 
memory more that my mother used to tell 
me of her early years. She was married for 
the first time when she was barely eighteen, 
and at twenty-two was a widow. Eight 
years afterwards she was married to my 
father. 


MY MOTHER 


43 


Of her beauty, that of a rose in bloom, 
there were traditions, and they could not 
have been exaggerated. She must have been 
an extremely beautiful girl for in her ma- 
turity her delicate complexion, large blue 
eyes and winsome smile were extremely at- 
tractive. She was not tall, and her figure 
was always slight. I cannot remember ever 
seeing her outside her own chamber without 
a soft white cap over the masses of her won- 
derful hair. Its colour was a rich dark red, 
the real Titian hue. To the end of her life 
her hair when uncoiled fell far below her 
waist and made a thick coil that ought not 
to have been concealed. She had put on 
caps before she was thirty, and never laid 
them off. 

My own hair had silver threads in it 
when I was twenty-five, but at seventy-four 
my mother’s retained its colour with only 
the slightest sprinkling, towards the end, of 
a little white in front, like the sifting of a 
fine powder. 

There was nothing that my mother could 
not do in the line of housekeeping or with 
her needle. Without fuss or flurry she su- 
pervised the household, perfectly able to do 
her own work, if that were necessary, per- 


44 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


fectly just in her requirements of any one 
who served her, never disturbed by the un- 
expected advent of guests, always open- 
handed and hospitable, and invariably more 
exacting with herself than with others. She 
made our clothing, lavishing beautiful needle- 
work on undergarments, while contented to 
let the outer frocks and cloaks wear a look 
of plainness. One of her maxims was, “Take 
most pains with what is out of sight.” She 
could see a garment worn on the street, come 
home and cut it out without a pattern ; she 
could give her little boys a thoroughly well- 
dressed look in suits originally worn by their 
father, and she possessed beyond any one I 
have ever known what may be called the 
gift of making the most of a little. 

Her will was law. No child so much as 
thought of disputing it, though her voice 
was never raised and her manner was quiet 
and gentle. She was timid to a degree, and 
especially disliked to go into any place where 
she must take the initiative among stran- 
gers. Still, if obliged to do so, she rose to 
the occasion concealing her diffidence so 
well that only those who knew her best 
were aware of the effort she was making. 
If a maid left, the advent of another was 


MY MOTHER 


45 


dreaded, and we would hear the dread ex- 
pressed in such a sentence as “ I wish the 
next day or two were over. It is so hard for 
me to have a strange person in the kitchen.” 
I remember a time when several housemaids 
had been tried in turn, weighed in the bal- 
ances and found wanting. One after an- 
other had been dismissed. Finally a woman 
was engaged who brought no credentials, but 
something in her bearing and countenance 
proved a recommendation. She was very neat, 
but evidently very poor, coming with a meagre 
outfit of clothing. She went about her work 
swiftly and capably, did as she was told, and 
had a talent for silence and for speaking in 
monosyllables that caused my father to name 
her “ the sphinx.” The name she gave us 
was Rachel Anne. I may mention, by the 
way, that this was the era of Mary Anne, 
Eliza Jane, Susan Elizabeth, and the like. 
A Susan Elizabeth might be shortened to 
Susie Lib, but the Mary Annes and Mary 
Janes received the full benefit of both the 
names bestowed upon them in baptism. 
Ediths, Dorothys and Ethels, Marjories and 
Margarets had not then come into fashion. 
All my young friends pitied me because my 
name was Margaret, and I pitied myself. 


46 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Our Rachel Anne had one peculiarity 
She was on the watch constantly in a sort 
of restrained terror lest strange men should 
appear at the house, and if any such drove 
up in a buggy, she fled to the attic and hid 
herself in its remotest corner. No one ever 
asked for her, and there was no reason to 
imagine her as a woman with a record of 
crime in the past, yet she bore herself as if 
she were an escaped convict, and we often 
thought that she might have been in prison. 
She remained in our home for some years, 
and mysteriously departed at last, in the 
night. 

My mother was the best of nurses. No 
professional nurse excelled her in the care of 
the sick, and she gave her knowledge of 
nursing and her unselfish watchfulness to 
friends and neighbours as freely as to her 
family. Trained nurses, skilled and intelli- 
gent, were not then to be had. When there 
was extreme illness in a house members of 
the family took turns in looking after the 
patient, and in each group of friends there 
was sure to be some one who knew what to 
do and how to do it, as if by magic. I re- 
member, and it is almost my first shadow, 
the day when an uncle, young and dearly 


MY MOTHER 47 

loved, came to his sister's very ill. He lived 
only a week or two and passed away. 

A little later a brother of mine, a noble 
little laddie, was taken ill, and after four 
weeks of pain and struggle was carried 
beyond all pain to the home of the blessed 
on high. The day before his death the 
child was left alone for a moment, and his 
mother coming to the door overheard his 
little whispered prayer, “ O Jesus, go with 
me through the dark valley, and keep Satan 
from troubling me." The death of this dear 
child for a long time eclipsed the joy of the 
household. With all her faith, and she had 
a large share of it, the mother could not 
rise above the sadness of the bereavement. 
She went about so white and still, so crushed, 
so aloof, that it seemed to the rest of us as 
if a wintry frost had settled down upon the 
garden of our lives. Nothing for a long time 
cheered her, and it sometimes seemed almost 
as if her heart had been buried in the grave 
of her little David, and as if she did not care 
for those who were left. Her nature was not 
one that easily resisted sorrow, and yet in 
after years when she was suddenly widowed, 
and was obliged to step to the front and 
assume responsibilities new to her, she bore 


48 FROM MY YOUTH UP 

herself with a fortitude that I now under- 
stand was heroism. 

She had the Scottish tendency to mysti- 
cism, and more than once there came to her 
in times of great anxiety or acute distress 
such a waft from the unseen shores, such 
real help from heaven that it was as if she 
had beheld a vision of angels. My little 
book, “When Angels Come to Men,” was 
written long after my mother had gone 
home, in fulfillment of a promise made to 
her that I would make a study of the angels 
as they are described in the Bible. 

Until her fiftieth year, though fragile, she 
possessed an elasticity of physical health that 
successfully resisted disease. That year she 
was prostrated by an attack of pneumonia. 
We almost lost her and I have felt sure in 
thinking of it that humanly speaking what 
kept her alive was her strong desire to live 
with and for her fatherless children. One 
morning it seemed that the end had come. 
She had almost crossed the boundary between 
this world and the next. Our beloved min- 
ister was there, the late honoured Reverend 
John D. Wells, so long President of the Pres- 
byterian Board of Foreign Missions, and our 
family physician, watch in hand, noted the 


MY MOTHER 


49 


failing breath. But the minutes passed and 
she did not die. Little by little she came 
back to us, and with a thrill of relief that no 
words can interpret we heard that our mother 
would live. The Psalmist said, “ With 
long life will I satisfy him, and show him 
my salvation,” and we had only to change 
the pronoun for the text to fit her. She 
was with us nearly twenty-five useful years 
from the time of this illness, although she 
was never again entirely free from the 
burdens of an invalid’s life. When I think 
of her I understand what is meant by the 
phrase “ unspotted from the world.” She 
was the most other-worldly person I ever 
knew, my dear little mother. Her standards 
were of the highest, her nature was keyed to 
an inflexible rectitude : she not only had no 
tinge of evil in her thoughts or words, but 
evil recoiled from her, so outshining was her 
purity. 

In the sweetness of her welcome to friends 
there was complete freedom from something 
that has gradually crept into much of our 
social intercourse. People came and went 
beneath our roof, as suited their convenience, 
rather than ours. The hostess was never dis- 
turbed by unexpected visitors and we often 


50 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


had friends with us who came because it 
pleased them to do so, and remained not 
days, but weeks and months at a time. 

My father, in his expansive cordiality, often 
gave rather thoughtless invitations to people 
whom he casually met and liked when he 
was away from home. Once we were in the 
midst of the May house-cleaning, a radical and 
thorough proceeding. There had been paint- 
ing and paper-hanging, scrubbing and scour- 
ing and I know not what else. Order was 
beginning to loom up on the horizon, but 
had by no means asserted itself when, with- 
out previous notification, a carriage drove to 
the door from which emerged, with carpet- 
bags and other paraphernalia, a family of 
seven, father, mother and children inclusive. 
They explained to my astonished mother 
who at once remembered the name, that they 
were the P’s from Providence, and that my 
father had asked them to spend what we 
now call a week’s-end at his home on their 
way to the West. Where they were to be put 
up and how accommodated in the chaotic 
state of affairs would have puzzled any one, 
except the mistress of the home. But they 
were speedily made to feel at ease, and 
nothing that occurred during their stay 


MY MOTHER 


51 


obliged them to regret their inopportune 
arrival. 

It often seems a little odd to me that my 
mother had patience with a daughter so 
unlike her as her eldest born. She had an 
orderly mind and kept all her belongings in 
the nicest array. She never suffered one 
day’s work, if she could by any chance help 
it, to lap over on the space of another. She 
had been trained in the womanly ways of 
the early nineteenth century, and she found 
herself confronted with insuperable obstacles 
by the time she had an elder daughter to 
train. My sister consoled her in a meas- 
ure for me, for sewing and household tasks 
were to me very nearly as difficult as arith- 
metic and algebra. The wise mother won 
me to my needle by letting hemming and 
over-handing go and giving me canvas and 
bright coloured wools with which I wrought 
samplers that were her pride. They are my 
pride as I survey them now, for in all the 
years that have flitted since I bent above 
their frames I have never taken so many 
stitches. Her time was before that of ready 
made garments, and she never took kindly 
to the sewing-machine. I fear I shall lose 
caste with some of my readers if I admit that 


52 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


I have seldom disdained a pin as a friend in 
need. Not so, my mother. Pins to her 
were the resort of the inefficient, and with 
inefficiency she had nothing to do. 

Little scenes and incidents arise in memory 
when one reverts to the past. Once there 
was a good deal of discussion in the family 
as to an overcharge of postage on certain 
letters. In the forties the postal rates 
were larger than they have been since, and 
quite a breeze arose around the table when 
my mother declared that she intended to 
write to the postmaster-general and ask that 
a certain reform should be introduced. 
Every one laughed at her, and every one de- 
clared that her letter would receive no atten- 
tion. Nevertheless, she wrote and sent her 
remonstrance and in due time received a 
courtly and elegant missive from the man at 
the head of the department. Whatever the 
contents were they gave the daring corre- 
spondent in the New Jersey home a transi- 
tory triumph over her family and neighbours. 

Another time, coming in from the street 
in the late afternoon the little lady of the 
house met a grenadier of a woman descending 
the stairs on her way out. The woman was a 
stranger who bore every mark of a suspicious 


MY MOTHER 


53 


character, and she carried in her hand a 
satchel. Nothing daunted, my mother ques- 
tioned the intruder, and divining that she 
was a thief requested her to open her bag and 
show what was inside. Immediately awed 
by the dignity of the little personage before 
her, the tall woman, who could easily have 
brushed past my mother into the street, 
obeyed the command and showed silver and 
jewelry that she had gathered up in different 
rooms of the house. We were not a little 
amazed when my mother said, “ I told the 
poor thing that if she kept on in work like 
this she would find herself before very long 
in the penitentiary. I told her, too, that 
she would better put her wits to doing some- 
thing honest, and warned her not to offend 
God by breaking the eighth command- 
ment.” 

The absolute fearlessness of a naturally 
timid nature when sure that the right is on 
its side was more than once displayed by this 
dear woman who never flinched in the pres- 
ence of peril. She would go with entire 
bravery, if need were, into a home invaded 
by contagious disease, and while taking every 
necessary precaution she would not have 
understood the cowardice we too often dis- 


54 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


play now that we know so much about 
malefic germs and evil bacteria. 

I have spoken of her marvellous intuition 
concerning the unseen world around us. 
Twice in her life I recall an incident that 
bordered on the supernatural. It was in a 
time of great stress and sorrow that she one 
evening in the twilight lay down for a mo- 
ment to rest in her chamber. Her life was 
in its first solitude after my father’s death, 
and many grave considerations as to the 
future were pressing upon her mind. 

She always declared that she had not fal- 
len asleep even for an instant, when sud- 
denly the darkening room was filled with a 
soft, diaphanous, golden light that dispersed 
the shadows and made a tender atmosphere 
around her. As she looked up wondering, 
out of this light grew a lovely angelic face, 
and wings were outspread above her bed. 
Then a voice said audibly, “ Be not faithless 
but believing.” The vision faded as gently 
as it had come, and the wearj' spirit was 
strengthened and calmed. 

Were I an artist drawing portraits of this 
mother of mine, one picture would represent 
her in the radiance of that girlhood which 
only my imagination could divine. Another 


MY MOTHER 


55 


would show her in the beautiful rounded ma- 
turity of her early middle age. She comes to 
me now in my dreams, straight, slender, lovely 
and full of health and courage. Another 
picture is in my mind as I write. It is of the 
later years when she walked softly, when she 
often spent days in her room, when her dress 
was always either gray or black, and when 
no one saw her without a soft white shawl 
thrown over her shoulders. To the very 
last, her presence in our home was benignant. 
Young girls would run in to see her and 
spend a few moments sitting at her feet. 
Her friends loved to come to her when she 
could not go to them. No one entered her 
room or left it without the feeling of a bene- 
diction. 

Just four weeks before her home-going she 
said to me one morning, “ I have something 
to tell you. Last night in my dreams I saw 
Belle. (My sister.) She said, 4 Mother, you 
have missed me very much in the year that 
I have been gone, but do not grieve any more. 
I am coming for you in just a month.’ I 
wish I could tell you how beautiful and 
young your sister looked and how wonderful 
the place was in which she was standing.” 

Neither my mother nor I thought of this 


56 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


vision as a prophecy, yet precisely four weeks 
from the date of this dream she left us to join 
those who were in heaven, the last to go be- 
fore her having been the sister who spoke to 
her in a dream full of comfort and sweetness. 


V 

COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 

E VERY morning there passes my sub- 
urban home a procession of children 
on their way to school. They go 
merrily onward, these dear little people, who 
have no burdens and no anxieties, whose 
lives are even cheerier and freer than those 
of the birds in the trees. Little boys and 
little girls, lads and lasses in the high school, 
I watch them with a feeling of love and an 
intensity of hope. Here are the men and 
women of the future. The spectator at the 
side of the road watches the army as it 
marches by, listens to the band that plays 
in front, sees the banners waving in the sun, 
and although merely a spectator shares the 
enthusiasm of the advancing column. 

The little men and women of to-day have 
come to their kingdom in a period pregnant 
with great issues. One who is almost in 
sight of the Inn at Journey’s-end is fain to 
wish that from another sphere it may be 
57 


58 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


possible to follow the miracles of these 
earthly days, as one by one they speed upon 
each other in the developments of the pres- 
ent century. Our immediate ancestors and 
the mighty generations who preceded them 
could not in their wildest dreams have im- 
agined the ease with which the forces of 
nature are made to serve us in this wonder- 
ful present time. We sit without a fear in 
underground railroads that tunnel the earth 
beneath rushing rivers ; we raise our build- 
ings to mountain height and are carried sky- 
wards on lifts that ply up and down all day 
long ; our elevated trains glide swiftly over 
our heads in the air and we sit at our desks 
and converse with friends across the conti- 
nent. When two great steamships collide in 
the mist the marvel of wireless telegraphy 
sends upward a cabalistic call for help, and 
straightway that call is heard by ships on 
the sea and ships stationed on the coast, and 
without delay these hasten to the rescue. 
Messages have been sent by wireless telegra- 
phy from railway trains in motion. To the 
children of the hour not one of these won- 
ders appears extraordinary, and as they grow 
older all these and many other marvels will 
be in the day’s work. 


COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 59 


The children are going to school, and I 
love them, and love, too, to notice as she 
trips along beside them, the little school- 
ma’am who is herself part of the advance 
guard of civilization. She it is who is shap- 
ing the future of the children in her care, 
children who really pass more hours of day- 
light under her hand than they do in the 
companionship of their parents. 

Let no one fancy that in everything the 
children of to-day have superior advantages 
or enjoy greater opportunities than belonged 
to those who went before them. I am by no 
means sure that the elaborate machinery of 
the twentieth century schoolroom surpasses 
the simpler methods of fifty years ago in 
matters essential to real culture, and I am 
decidedly of the opinion that home and 
school in America at least are just now 
united in the perilous business of hurrying 
children too rapidty through childhood. 
The teacher, wherever we find her, is the 
guardian angel of the children. Women are 
so largely in the majority in the teaching 
profession, especially in the elementary years, 
that I use the feminine pronoun with inten- 
tion. Teaching is an ill-paid profession and 
it exacts a large toll of strength of body and 


60 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


mind from those who devote their lives to its 
service. There are towns and villages in this 
land in which the community owes a debt it 
can never hope to pay, to the generosity, 
wisdom and self-sacrifice of the teachers in 
private and public schools. 

When I began this chapter I asked myself 
what external feature marked the difference 
between the children of my day and the 
children who passed my door this morning. 
It is hard for these little folk to realize that 
their grandmothers were once like them- 
selves, and were as eager to reach the school- 
room by nine o’clock and be in their places 
in season, as they can possibly be. We were 
provided with bags in which to carry our 
books, and I notice that most of my little 
friends carry theirs in their hands. We 
wore hats summer and winter. Until the 
snow flies and the thermometer registers 
zero, the little maids of New Jersey prefer to 
leave their hats at home and skip along bare- 
headed. But the chief point of difference in 
dress may be indicated in a single word. 
These children do not wear aprons. We did. 

Aprons indeed formed an important part 
of the outfit of a well-dressed child in the 
forties. They were made in various styles, 


COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 61 


sometimes with suspenders pinned on the 
shoulder and revealing the waist of the dress, 
sometimes with three-cornered bibs and wide 
strings tied in a bow behind, and often with 
full skirt gathered into a yoke, and full 
sleeves terminating in a band at the wrist. 
This latter fashion was peculiarly pretty and 
useful, as an apron of this pattern was a com- 
plete covering and any sort of dress might be 
worn beneath it. Girls of eleven and twelve 
often had for dress occasions aprons of black 
silk, ruffled, embroidered or braided. For 
every-day wear a mother who wished to save 
washing and ironing might put an apron of 
black alpaca on her little daughter, but as a 
rule, aprons that could be tubbed at discre- 
tion were preferred. 

The broad hair ribbons that children are 
wearing now were then reserved for sashes to 
ornament white frocks and finish a child's 
toilette when the child was dressed for a 
function. Narrow hair ribbons were worn 
by girls who had long braids, but many wore 
their hair short for the first dozen years, 
turning it back from the face with a round, 
rubber comb. In summer then as now it 
was necessary for little girls to have changes 
enough to keep them comfortable and dainty, 


62 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


but in winter most of us were considered 
thoroughly equipped for all occasions if we 
had a best frock for Sundays and an every- 
day one to be worn through the week. 
Sometimes last winter’s best frock was let 
down to suit the growing child, and she had 
it for second-best while her dark-stuff frock 
under the apron fully fitted her for school. 

Children at school wore thick shoes in 
winter with woolen stockings, and in sum- 
mer their stockings were white and they 
were often seen with slippers. Young girls, 
and for that matter, girls who had finished 
school and were in society, were frequently 
shod with thin-soled shoes. I remember 
hearing a man of some elegance, who was ap- 
parently a dictator of fashion in his circle, 
remark with emphasis that no refined gentle- 
woman would wear a thick-soled shoe. In 
Jane Austen’s day and in that of Charlotte 
Bronte young girls evidently suffered from 
this folly, for we find Jane Bennet in “ Pride 
and Prejudice” prostrated by cold and fever 
as a result of a walk in the rain in which her 
feet were soaked. In “ Shirley ” on the night 
that the Mill takes fire a picturesque scene 
that all readers of that novel must recall, 
two young girls, in shoes with paper soles, 


COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 63 


and thin frocks that catch on the briars as 
they haste along, run across the stubble fields 
from the vicarage to the hollow where the 
mill stands. No doubt one of the reasons 
why consumption used to be so deadly a 
scourge may have been found in the lack of 
proper care in protecting the feet, when 
young people were out-of-doors. 

I have never at any time in my life felt so 
entirely well dressed, nor looked at myself in 
the glass with so proud an air of satisfaction 
as when at the age of eleven I had a frock of 
red calico and a white apron daintily ruffled. 
The apron had pockets, the dress was cut 
round in the neck and had sleeves ending at 
the elbow. The girls in our school were 
similarly arrayed that summer in dresses of 
bright red, and the schoolroom must have 
resembled a bed of poppies. Mothers little 
understand the depth of happiness, the pro- 
found pleasure that children feel when 
they are dressed as others are and are sure 
that they have on precisely the right cos- 
tume. The little heroine of “ Anne of Green 
Gables ” affirmed a self-evident truth when 
she said that people would rather be absurd 
in company than sensible all alone. Usually 
it costs no more in pains and money to dress 


64 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


a child as her mates are dressed than to 
make her conspicuous in some other way. 

While other portions of childish dress were 
simple, hats were more or less fanciful as the 
little grandmothers wore them. They were 
trimmed with feathers and flowers and bows 
of bright ribbon, and were of every variety 
of shape from the piquant gipsey to the pic- 
turesque drooping broad-brim, or the severer 
sailor hat. 

Once when just beyond my twelfth birth- 
day I went to visit a Welsh friend whose 
daughters were my schoolmates, I wore a 
hat of fine white chip trimmed with black 
velvet and pink roses. One evening we were 
all going to hear a lecture by a distinguished 
man, and rain came down in torrents at the 
moment of starting. To go in my pretty hat 
was not to be thought of, and neither was it 
possible that I should be seen in the audience 
with uncovered head, that fashion having 
not yet made its way into existence. The 
question was speedily settled for me by my 
hostess whose own daughters had contentedly 
and quickly dressed themselves in their old- 
est garments. She brought out a faded cloak 
that was kept for rainy days and a fearful 
and wonderful bonnet of her own, a bonnet 


COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 65 


of blue silk with garniture of yellow flowers. 
Year in and year out it had seen service, and 
the countryside knew it well. “ What will 
people say when they see me in this mas- 
querade?” I exclaimed as the lady fastened 
her bonnet under my chin. “ Unless you 
think about yourself, nobody will think 
about you,” was her reply ; “ and why should 
you give up a pleasure that you will remem- 
ber, when you can enjoy it to the full in a 
uniform like this ? ” 

With the invention of the sewing-machine 
feminine clothing became constantly more 
elaborate. Tucks and ruffles could be mul- 
tiplied to an unlimited extent when the 
work was done, not by hand but by ma- 
chinery. Thoughtful people objected to the 
introduction of this useful machine into the 
domain of household sewing, fearing that 
it would take the bread away from women 
who had no other resource, but the seam- 
stress and the dressmaker, as well as the 
house-mother, soon found the sewing-ma- 
chine indispensable, and instead of less- 
ening their wage it increased its average 
rate. 

Another reminiscence of the dear Welsh 
lady drifts into memory from the past. She 


66 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


had a creative and inventive mind, and be- 
fore golf capes came into general use she 
made something very like them for her 
daughters. She argued that the plaid shawls 
of fine wool that were common then were 
always slipping off, and in her view were too 
old to be worn by children and young girls, 
so, taking her shears and fastening a pattern 
on the shawls, she proceeded to cut out cir- 
cular capes to which she attached hoods, 
and these, preferably of gay colours, were 
worn by her girls and were warm and com- 
fortable. They were wadded and lined, and 
the daughter who did not care what she had 
on, if only it pleased her mother, went smil- 
ingly to school thus arrayed, while the other 
who had ideas of her own and wished to be 
in the fashion was ashamed to be seen during 
cold weather. The good mother had no real- 
ization of the pangs her Nelly suffered, for 
the child said little to her, comprehending 
that under the old regime nothing that she 
said would avail to change the situation. 

There has been a swing of the pendulum 
since in the opposite direction, and it may 
be that it has swung too far, but is it not 
better that children in a world, where sooner 
or later they must find much that is trouble- 


COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 67 


some, shall have very few trials in a matter 
so insignificant as what they shall wear ? 

Two pageants of yesterday rise before me 
as I write. One is that of a May-queen pro- 
cession in which a long column of children 
marches two by two, the girls heading the 
line, the boys bringing up the rear. In front 
of the procession is carried a banner, and just 
behind it a little band of girls bear in their 
midst a large flat basket in which lies a 
beautiful wreath of roses. This is the crown 
that is to be placed on the head of the queen 
when the vernal wood is reached where the 
fete is to take place. Here there is a May- 
pole around which the children will dance. 
The girls are all in white, and the boys have 
white trousers and blue jackets with brass 
buttons. The little girl who has been chosen 
queen for the day is the one her schoolmates 
most love, and has been chosen not because 
she is the most beautiful or the most clever, 
or the best in her studies, but simply because 
her sweet, unselfish goodness has made her 
the idol of their hearts. 

The May-queen procession could not al- 
ways take place on the first of May, but 
skies grew clear and blue and the blossoms 
came out cfn the tr'etes and the world p\it on 


68 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


its gala dress some time during the month, 
and then we had our May-day fete. All day 
long we would have a good time under the 
open sky, going home at evening-tide after 
our picnic with a sense of satisfaction in 
which there was no flaw. 

By the time that I was twelve I wrote the 
songs for the May-day picnic, and more than 
once had the pleasure of arranging the en- 
tire procession, inclusive of fairies, trolls and 
elves ; at least, different children took these 
parts, and though to grown-up spectators 
there may have been little difference in their 
dress from that worn by the others, each set 
of children had a badge revealing to the in- 
itiated just what part they were to take. 

A yet more brilliant fete of the year, 
longed for by children and enjoyed to the 
full, was the Fourth of July. To us it was 
a glorious day. We hailed it with enthusi- 
asm, the town itself bloomed out in gala 
dress and celebrated the nation’s independ- 
ence, every private house showing its flag 
and every church and public building 
being lavishly decorated with bunting. The 
feature of the morning was a military 
parade, the soldiers marching to the town 
hall. Then came troups of children, the 


COMMON DAYS AND GALA DAYS 69 


girls dressed in white with sashes of red and 
blue, while the boys wore pinned on their 
jackets a little American flag. Children and 
soldiers vied with each other in celebrating 
the nation's greatest day. 

On the platform, clergymen, judges and 
men of distinction sat in impressive array, the 
governor of the state or some other promi- 
nent official frequently being present. The 
orator of the day came forward and made a 
ringing address. Then some one read with 
emphasis the Declaration of Independence 
and patriotic songs were sung, and every one 
went home inspired with pride in the country 
and thankful to belong to the free Republic. 
Of course we had fireworks in the evening, 
cannonading during the day, and all day 
long the usual number of small explosives, 
but there was a marked absence, I fancy, on 
the part of grown people, of the dislike so 
often expressed to a rollicking Fourth of 
July. Old and young enjoyed Independ- 
ence Day, and celebrated it in the good old- 
fashioned way when I was a child. 


VI 

THE HOME LIBRARY 

A S a little apple-cheeked maid I at- 
tended school more or less regularly 
after my eighth year, although I did 
not settle down to school work with much 
seriousness until 1848. Was it really true, I 
wonder, that the winters were longer and 
colder and the snow deeper then than now ? 
I can see myself well bundled up, walking 
to school between snow walls on either side 
the road, and having jolly times when a 
gallant neighbour-boy drew me there on his 
sled. There were two or three of these neigh- 
bour-boys who were very good to the little 
girls, and if they are still living on the earth 
I hope the world has prospered with them. 
One of the most devoted in his attentions 
used to bring me little offerings of pepper- 
mint sticks and licorice. I met him years 
after our childhood when in the glory of my 
first trained dress I was attending a wedding. 
He, too, happened to be a wedding guest, and 
when presented to me remarked that we had 
70 


THE HOME LIBRARY 


71 


met before. We had a pleasant little talk 
over old times and then our ways parted 
never to cross again. 

Another lad sent me my first valentine, 
and occasionally assisted me through the 
puzzle of boundary lines, and sums in long 
division. My earliest education admitted 
much healthful comradeship with the boys 
who attended the same school. We all 
played and worked together, boys and girls, 
and the intercourse was as it should be, on 
the plane of children in the same family. 
The people in the community were mostly 
of the comfortable middle class who possess 
neither poverty nor riches, but live quiet, 
self-respecting lives, taking the days as they 
come, performing duties simply and exchang- 
ing friendly courtesies as a matter of course. 

Our household was like that of others in the 
same town. We possibly had more books than 
most of our neighbours. A few ancient vol- 
umes had come to us from the past, dating 
back to the sixteenth century, one or two of 
them rudely printed. There were still other 
old volumes of a later date, among them one 
which interested me as it contained a num- 
ber of sermons preached in England soon 
after the execution of Charles the First. 


72 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Even as a little thing under ten I read books 
of a homiletic turn, and having made up my 
small mind at that period that Charles the 
First was a martyr I perused these sermons, 
though they were beyond my comprehension, 
with laborious zeal. The fact that many of 
the preachers approved the deed only excited 
my ire. This volume and a number of oth- 
ers had originally belonged to a great uncle 
of my mother, who had for forty years minis- 
tered to one congregation in Scotland. We 
had a bound volume of his sermons in manu- 
script, but I venture the remark that none of 
us ever succeeded in reading one of them. 
They were closely written in a small some- 
what cramped hand, and contained the ortho- 
dox number of divisions and heads. 

Apart from the quaint old books men- 
tioned, there were others historical and 
polemical, and as there were comparatively 
few juveniles to attract attention, I pored 
indiscriminately over Rollin’s Ancient His- 
tory, Plutarch’s Lives and Hume’s History of 
England. A great delight cast its radiant 
glow over my horizon when on a certain 
birthday a number of charming small books 
bound in red found their way into the house. 
They included the lives of many celebrated 


THE HOME LIBRARY 


73 


persons, — kings, queens, emperors and com- 
manders on land and sea, and were 
written by one of the Abbotts, probably 
John S. C. The same author wrote a Life 
of Napoleon that I eagerly devoured, fol- 
lowing it soon after by an enthusiastic study 
of “ Napoleon and His Marshalls,” by J. T. 
Headley. “ The Eollo Books,” by Jacob Ab- 
bott, reached me too late for my enjoyment 
since at eleven I found them too juvenile. 
About this time I made acquaintance with 
Cowper’s “ Task,” Thomson’s “ Seasons,” 
“ Marmion ” and “ The Lady of the Lake.” 
Of Sir Walter’s prose I remember reading 
“ Ivanhoe,” but others of his novels I did not 
read for some years. 

My favourite writer of romances at this 
period was a woman whom the young peo- 
ple of the twentieth century would probably 
regard as tedious. Mrs. Sherwood was a 
young English lady who went to India as 
the wife of a man in the English Civil Serv- 
ice. There she entered into the most exclu- 
sive British society, but did not give herself 
over to a whirl of gaiety. She was deeply 
religious, and was a friend of the sainted 
Henry Martyn. Her stories were highly 
evangelical, and frequently built around the 


74 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


church catechism. I cannot imagine little 
girls of to-day, unless, fortunately for them- 
selves, they are sufferers from a sort of book 
famine, as caring much for Mrs. Sherwood’s 
tales, but to me “ The Fairchild Family,” for 
example, had an engaging charm, the 
memory of which lingers with me like a per- 
fume. 

One of our neighbours was the pastor of a 
Congregational church in the vicinity, and 
his young wife and I were great friends. I 
had free access to the ministerial library, a 
small collection of well chosen books, and 
often when the minister was out making 
calls on parishioners, I was permitted to 
have the study to myself, and there I would 
read until the darkness gathered and the 
book had to be laid aside. 

I was a sentimental child and I used to 
touch with a certain reverence a few beauti- 
fully bound volumes that had been love of- 
ferings of these two happy people to one an- 
other in their days of courtship. These were 
on a shelf by themselves, and below them on 
another were books inscribed in a strong 

hand, “ To my dear wife, Adeline .” 

People know very little of the dreams and 
fancies that flit through the brains of the 


THE HOME LIBRARY 


75 


smaller folk around them, and nobody 
thought for an instant that a demure little 
girl was making the grave young minister her 
ideal, and hoping that one day some one pre- 
cisely like him might make such gifts to her 
as he had bestowed upon his Adeline. 

The Pilgrim’s Progress was perennially a 
satisfaction. We had Bunyan’s amazing 
book in a fine old edition with quaint wood- 
cuts. I read the story over and over and al- 
most knew by heart every stage in Chris- 
tian’s journey, trembling with him at the 
thought of the lion, stepping with him into 
the House of the Interpreter, suffering with 
him in the clutches of Giant Despair and 
triumphing with him at the end of his jour- 
ney. I must linger over this marvellous 
book which to me as a child was more fasci- 
nating than a fairy tale. I loved especially 
one scene that Christian beheld in the House 
of the Interpreter. The candles had been 
lighted and the Pilgrim was receiving cour- 
teous attention from his grave and stately 
host who revealed to his eyes life pageants 
for his future profit. One of these was the 
peculiarly vivid description that I quote. 

“ I saw also, that the Interpreter took him 
again by the hand, and led him into a pleas- 


76 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ant place, where was built a stately palace, 
beautiful to behold ; at the sight of which 
Christian was greatly delighted. He saw 
also upon the top thereof certain persons 
walking, who were clothed all in gold. 

“ Then said Christian, May we go in 
thither ? 

“ Then the Interpreter took him, and led 
him up towards the door of the palace ; and 
behold, at the door stood a great company of 
men, as desirous to go in, but durst not. 
There also sat a man at a little distance from 
the door, at a table-side, with a book and his 
ink-horn before him, to take the names of 
them that should enter therein ; he saw also 
that in the doorway stood many men in ar- 
mour to keep it, being resolved to do to the 
men that would enter what hurt and mis- 
chief they could. Now was Christian some- 
what in amaze. At last, when every man 
started back for fear of the armed men, 
Christian saw a man of a very stout counte- 
nance come up to the man that sat there to 
write, saying, ‘ Set down my name, sir ; ’ 
the which when he had done, he saw the 
man draw his sword, and put a helmet on 
his head, and rush towards the door upon 
the armed men, who laid upon him with 


THE HOME LIBRARY 


77 

deadly force ; but the man, not at all dis- 
couraged, fell to cutting and hacking most 
fiercely. So after he had given and received 
many wounds to those that attempted to 
keep him out, he cut his way through them 
all, and pressed forward into the palace ; at 
which there was a pleasant voice heard from 
those that were within, even of those that 
walk upon the top of the palace, saying, 

“ 1 Come in, come in, 

Eternal glory thou shalt win. 7 

So he went in, and was clothed with such 
garments as they. Then Christian smiled, 
and said, I think verily I know the meaning 
of this.” 

Another battle scene that thrills me yet, 
one that I understand far better than in 
the days of childhood, was the famous 
fight between Christian and Apollyon. The 
illustration represented the fiend clad in 
armour and opposing Christian fiercely 
and terribly, literally barring the path 
over which Christian must tread to reach 
his goal. The conversation is remarka- 
ble in its force and directness. Regard- 
ing the Pilgrim with a disdainful coun- 
tenance, Apollyon demands to know his 


78 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


name and the object of his journey. When 
told, he quickly claims Christian as his sub- 
ject, and promises him rewards and advan- 
tages on condition that he return to his alle- 
giance. Thus in every age has the mighty 
adversary of souls tried to win them to him- 
self. Failing to disturb Christian, who 
frankly tells him that having taken service 
under another Prince he prefers the work 
and the wages and the land to which he is 
going and everything connected with his 
new Master, to anything Apollyon could 
offer, he assails him with fiery darts, he 
hurls a flaming dart at Christian’s breast, he 
sends flying about him a perfect hail-storm 
of blows and burning arrows, some of which 
wound the Pilgrim who is finally borne to 
the ground, his sword dropping from his 
hand. One held her breath in awe and ter- 
ror at this crisis of the dreadful conflict, only 
to flush with exultant gladness when Chris- 
tian nimbly reached again for the sword, 
and summoning all his strength, gave the 
fiend a final deadly thrust. Christian’s con- 
flict with Apollyon lasted more than half a 
day. How many of ours have lasted whole 
days and whole weeks? But with thanks to 
thb Lord of the way, we have been able to 


THE HOME LIBRARY 79 

put the foe to flight, crying, “ Rejoice not 
over me, O mine enemy. Though I fall, I 
shall arise again.” 

We had very few novels in our library 
and those on its shelves were old-fashioned 
romances. There used to be on the part of 
many good people a prejudice against fiction, 
and where this had become firmly estab- 
lished it was hard to uproot. By almost im- 
perceptible degrees as the children grew 
older, the books in the house took on a 
lighter character. My sister and I were 
young girls when “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin ” ap- 
peared, and it is not too much to say that it 
took us by storm. I began reading it on a 
Saturday afternoon unfortunately for myself, 
and at a late bedtime laid it reluctantly 
down. To finish an exciting book of this 
kind on Sunday was a thing almost impossi- 
ble considering the habits and convictions of 
the household and my own youthful princi- 
ples. Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon as 
the book lay upon the bureau in my room, 
I could not resist the desire to peep into it 
and read just a little more about little Eva 
and Uncle Tom. To read standing did not 
present itself as quite so wrong as to read 
comfortably seated in a chair. I do not 


80 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


know how long I stood beside the window 
absorbed in the story, but I do know that I 
read until it was time to light the lamps. 

Among the stories in lighter vein that 
gradually came into the house were “The 
Wide, Wide World/’ “ Queechy ” and “ Say 
and Seal,” by Miss Warner; “The Lamp- 
lighter,” by an author I cannot recall, and 
under protest from older friends who had 
themselves read the book, a work that was 
attracting a great deal of attention, Char- 
lotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” In view of 
the problem novels with which we have 
grown only too familiar in the last decade 
it seems singular that “Jane Eyre” should 
have been so unsparingly condemned as a 
dangerous production by many of its readers. 
Once it had been admitted into the house it 
acted as an entering wedge, and fiction found 
the right of way and hobnobbed in the same 
room with Owen’s “ Fourfold State ” and 
Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest.” 

We had the habit of reading aloud in the 
evening and this enabled us to share the 
pleasure and profit of our books. A book 
that is enjoyed by the whole family and that 
provokes discussion is educational whatever 
its subject may be. By the time Harper's 


THE HOME LIBRARY 


81 


Magazine became a monthly visitor we read 
it in this way, often beginning at the first 
article and going straight through the maga- 
zine as if we were listeners at a concert, 
taking the numbers as they were on the 
programme. 

A juvenile magazine that, was a prede- 
cessor of the Youth’s Companion, St. Nicholas 
and other favourites of children was called 
Robert Merry’s Museum. This the younger 
children liked. It did not appeal to me for 
my taste had been formed by literature of a 
different order. 

When we first made acquaintance with 
Charles Dickens we were introduced to 
groups of men and women who seemed to 
be flesh and blood, and not puppets of an 
author’s moving. “ David Copperfield ” was 
the first of this magician’s books to take hold 
of my heart and open for me the doors into 
a world of delight. From the time I first 
read Dickens until the June day when I 
heard of his death I never lost an opportu- 
nity of reading everything that he wrote. I 
heard him read “ Boots at the Holly Tree 
Inn ” during his last visit to America. He 
stepped out upon the platform, a trim, jaunty 
figure with a flower in his buttonhole, and 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


when he began to read with his pleasant 
voice and the rising inflection at the end of 
a sentence, he completed his mastery over 
one of his loyal admirers. 

There are those who criticise Charles Dick- 
ens because of his fondness for depicting low 
life, but in “ A Tale of Two Cities ” and 
“ Little Dorrit,” if nowhere else, he showed 
himself entirely capable of describing the 
thorough gentleman. On the day long after 
childhood when I suddenly heard of his 
death, the sky grew dark above my head. 
I was walking on a Southern highway, and a 
friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, 
stopped and said, “ Have you heard that 
Charles Dickens is dead ? ” It was as if I 
had been robbed of one of the dearest of 
friends. 

In the beginning of my life books were to 
me as real as people, and the characters on 
the printed page as much a part of my being 
as those whom I met on the street or talked 
with at the table. I would not, if I could, 
give up the memory of the joy I have had 
in books for any advantage that could be 
offered in other pursuits or occupations. 
Books have been to me what gold is to the 
miser, what new fields are to the explorer, 


THE HOME LIBRARY 


83 


what a new discovery is to the scientific 
student. The great harvest of pleasure I 
have had in them had its seed-sowing in 
the little home library that was the chief 
treasure of my childhood. 


VII 

OLD FRIENDS 

I T is a little curious to note how the stage 
setting of life changes from one period 
to another. The scenery shifts as it does 
in a play. There is for each of us the back- 
ground of home and kindred. Here we have 
our starting-point, and against this back- 
ground, as on a canvas, pictures are thrown, 
pictures that move along with the progress 
of time. Neighbours and friends have their 
entrance and exit on the stage of life, and 
the friends of the family become part of the 
pageantry that I have never altogether for- 
gotten. Friends of greater or less degree of 
intimacy become as thoroughly a portion 
of the household life and economy as those 
who belong to it by ties of blood. Thus, as 
I think of old and dear familiar friends they 
seem to me to have belonged as much to the 
panorama of childhood as did my nearest of 
kin. 

Glancing backward, certain figures stand 
out in bold relief against the canvas. One 
84 


OLD FRIENDS 


85 


friend of the family who can never be for- 
gotten was an energetic spinster who taught 
in one of the public schools, and who at 
fifty, growing weary of the particular orbit 
in which she had moved, decided then and 
there to study music and devote her future 
time to giving instructions to beginners. 
Teaching music seemed to her preferable to 
teaching grammar and spelling. She was 
short and stout, had merry twinkling eyes, 
and hair sifted over with gray. Her plump 
fingers had never touched a piano, and she 
did not know one note from another. She 
had no ear for melody, and the only tunes 
she knew were those she sang in church. 
Nevertheless, she went to a professor, ar- 
ranged with him for several lessons a week, 
hired a piano and valiantly attacked the 
most jealous and exacting art in existence. 
Each afternoon when her work for the day 
was over she sat down to the piano, and with 
stiff, unaccustomed fingers played scales and 
exercises, patiently counting one, two, three, 
four, precisely as the children did. Every 
one prophesied that she would fail, and her 
thrifty friends to a woman censured her for 
wasting her money on so futile an under- 
taking. But she kept on her genial way, 


86 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


laughing and telling stories and increasing 
her daily practice, until it occupied a large 
portion of her evenings. 

We have made so much progress in mu- 
sical taste and are so much more exacting than 
we used to be that had Miss Winifred lived at 
present she must inevitably have met with 
disappointment. People were satisfied then 
with much less than is demanded now, and 
the dear lady after two years of study resigned 
the position she had long held, rented a 
studio and announced herself ready to re- 
ceive pupils. She soon had all the little 
boys and girls for whom she could care, and 
she really taught them very well, having a 
great store of patience, and succeeding espe- 
cially in making them accurate readers at 
sight, and in cultivating their musical memo- 
ries. Whether they touched the keys lightly 
or heavily, held their hands at the right an- 
gle, or learned to play anything except the 
little pieces that entertained tired fathers at 
nightfall after a day’s work, I do not know, 
but Miss Winifred spent ten very happy 
years in her new profession, and was dearly 
loved by the children who came to her. 

She had a way of putting her arm around 
a little girl and of ruffling a boy’s tumbled 


OLD FRIENDS 


87 


hair that seemed irresistible to her small pu- 
pils, and as a story-teller of fairy-lore and of 
Indian warfare she was thoroughly unsur- 
passed. As she boarded and had no people 
belonging to her, she was a welcome Sunday 
evening visitor in many homes, and the young 
people of all ages carried to her their confi- 
dences and did not disdain her sensible 
advice. 

Miss Winifred had the priceless gift of 
humour. She saw the fun in a situation 
and her wit responded to it in a flash, but 
there was no malice in her sallies, and she 
won the hearts of old people by listening to 
their thrice-told tales without a sign of hav- 
ing heard them before. Her chief domestic 
accomplishment was knitting, and she made 
beautiful little garments for babies and shawls 
for old ladies. Miss Winifred was gathered 
to her fathers in a good old age, and very 
generally lamented. 

Another friend stands out vividly in recol- 
lection because she was the first bride whom I 
ever personally knew in the glory of bridal rai- 
ment. We called her Miss Mary. She often 
spent long periods in our home, and she had 
quick, alert ways that reminded one of a bird. 
Cheery, brave, straightforward, and singu- 


88 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


larly unselfish, she was a second self to my 
mother who years before had lost her only 
sister. There was no tie of blood, yet Miss 
Mary was like a sister, and like an aunt to 
us. The friendship with her continued 
through the years of her long life. The last 
time I saw her was one wintry day when she 
came to my home for an unexpected call. 
She was now widowed and childless and very 
solitary. Her own home had been given up, 
and she was living most comfortably in that 
of a brother. But she had reached the rest- 
less time that comes to old people when 
many of their natural ties are severed, and 
their hands seem empty because they have 
little to do and are nowhere indispensable. 
The same quick, short step that had been 
hers when young was hers in the shadow of 
eighty, and she had the same impetuous and 
peremptory manner. “ I am not contented 
at J.’s,” she said to me. “ I don't feel at 
home there. The house is too big, the floors 
are too slippery and the butler is too solemn. 
I mean to pack up, leave there and spend the 
rest of my life with you. I shall be with 
you in a week, and you can just have my 
room ready. Let me have the one next to 
yours." 


OLD FKIENDS 


89 


What could I do but gather the little figure 
close into my arms and assure her that if she 
wished to come, I wished to have her do so ? 
We planned it before she left, and she went 
briskly down the street with the pace that 
was like a toy wound up, smiling at the 
corner and waving her hand. A week later 
she was in her Father’s house in the home- 
land, safe and contented and beyond all 
weariness, with the kindred who had gone 
before. There was no illness, only a few 
hours of faint weakness, and the silver cord 
was loosed. 

My first childish visit away from home 
was made under the care of this friend, and 
We came together in the summer of 1848 to 
spend a few days in Bloomfield, New Jersey, 
a little distance only from the place where I 
am now writing. There is an old garden 
here past which I sometimes walk, and in it 
flowers are blooming as they bloomed when 
Miss Mary and I alighted from the carriage 
at the door of the friendly house that gath- 
ered us in. 

The summer of 1848 was darkened by a 
cholera epidemic. Hundreds of victims died 
after a few hours’ illness. Whole families 
were swept away by the scourge. The first 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


two days of my visit with Miss Mary glided 
blissfully away. We were to have remained 
a week, but a messenger came urging our im- 
mediate return, and we took leave of our 
hosts with disappointment, Miss Mary feel- 
ing as acutely as I that our visit was too 
soon ended. 

The family at home had fallen into a 
panic, the dread disease having invaded the 
household of intimate friends. Miss Mary 
was especially vexed at our summons back. 
“ Why should we rush straight into the 
lion’s mouth when we are really safe and 
comfortable ? ” I sympathized with her feel- 
ing of regret at a visit being cut short in the 
middle, but I understood later the wave of 
uncertainty and terror that swept through 
the community and made every one feel that 
it was better to have the dear ones close 
around the hearth than separated. 

A third friend whose portrait is fadeless in 
memory was young and strong when I sat on 
his knee and talked to him in the firelight. 
His Christian name was Anthony, and it 
might well have had the prefix Saint, for 
few men whom I have ever known so well 
deserved the title. Anthony was a hired 
man who went on various errands and did 


OLD FRIENDS 


91 


all sorts of things, who loved horses and 
dogs and understood every detail of farm 
work. When a small boy he had lost the 
sight of an eye by accident, and when he 
lived with us he was gradually losing the 
sight of the other. In later years he became 
totally blind and almost totally deaf. Not- 
withstanding these limitations, he continued 
to work with his hands on one or another 
farm in New Jersey, so long as his strength 
endured. He learned how to make baskets 
and fish-nets, and after he could no longer 
toil at difficult labour he made and sold 
these among his friends. During all the 
years that I knew Anthony Beam I never 
once heard him complain of blindness, deaf- 
ness or poverty. “ I have a rich Father in 
heaven,” he would say, “ and my wants will 
always be supplied.” They always were, to 
the end, and Anthony lived to be an old, old 
man. He had food, shelter and clothing and 
just enough money in his pocket to enable 
him to go from place to place in the little 
round of his visits to friends. 

In the winter he would find an asylum in 
the hospitable home of a Sussex County 
farmer, where he would make himself unob- 
trusively useful, and was welcome to stay as 


92 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


long as it pleased him. When spring came 
and the snows were gone, he emerged from 
this seclusion and went to one or another 
home of those whom he had known or served 
in other days. I never knew when he might 
appear at my door in the spring or the sum- 
mer, but I counted on at least two visits 
from him of a week or ten days during the 
season. 

He never missed attendance at church, al- 
though for years he could not hear a word of 
prayer or sermon, but he said that he gained 
great comfort and strength by sitting in the 
sanctuary and having a place among the 
people of God. He loved to hear the Bible 
read, and though his deafness made it a diffi- 
cult task, there were few households in 
which some one did not read a portion of 
Scripture to Anthony before wishing him 
good-night. What he would have done had 
he lived until motor cars added a new peril 
to pedestrians, I do not know, but he went 
about confidently, finding helpers everywhere 
in his blindness, crossing Broadway when it 
was most crowded, and fearlessly passing 
from point to point, never meeting with de- 
lay or accident. Towards the end of his life 
he received from somewhere a little legacy. 


OLD FRIENDS 


93 


He told me how it had dropped into his 
hands unexpectedly, a gift from heaven. 
“ You will save it, Anthony,” I said, “ to take 
care of you if you are ill, or to help you in 
a rainy day ? ” 

“ I won’t be ill,” he answered. “ Why 
should I prepare for that ? And I have 
never had a rainy day and none is coming. 
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with this 
money. It isn’t very much, but it is enough 
to let me put a stone above my mother’s 
grave that has been unmarked for thirty 
years, and to put a railing around it and buy 
ground enough for me to lie beside her. If 
there is any left after that it shall go into the 
missionary box.” 

More than once since Anthony’s death I 
have met in Northern New Jersey at a mis- 
sionary or association meeting some one who 
has introduced herself by saying, “ You used 
to know Anthony Beam.” Immediately 
there has been a bond between the stranger 
and me. The dear old man, utterly poor in 
this world’s goods for five and seventy years, 
unable from early manhood to see more than 
the difference between light and dark, de- 
barred by his deafness from hearing sweet 
sounds, and without education beyond what 


94 : 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


he had acquired at the District School 
when he was very young, was still one of 
nature’s gentlemen, a child of God and a 
humble follower of the Master. So he be- 
longed to a royal brotherhood, and it was a 
privilege to have him for a friend. He 
loved little children and they loved him. 
In whatever house he entered he was at 
home. Servants never resented his coming, 
and whatever their creed, they recognized in 
him a man whose religion was real. Among 
old friends I have few whose claim to re- 
gard is higher than that of blind Anthony. 

Other friends are remembered too all the 
more tenderly that most of them are no 
longer here. One dear lady who was with us 
until a recent period was fourteen years my 
senior. She used to come to the house when 
I was in my cradle, and through my entire 
life she was my devoted friend. Visits to the 
home of her parents were among the pleasures 
of my early days, and her visits to our house 
were always a joy. I particularly loved to 
visit her because, forsooth, in the living- 
room there was a certain low, broad, old 
sofa, with red cushions and ample room for 
one to curl up in comfort and read as long as 
one chose. My friend never disturbed me 


OLD FRIENDS 


95 


in this enjoyment. She would pass in and 
out of the room, letting me read or dream as 
I liked. 

Hers was a sweet, strong, symmetrical 
character. There was a large family, and in 
it she was my especial guardian. Towards 
the end of her days her memory failed in 
certain phases, and while she had no diffi- 
culty in recalling the past, she forgot what 
had happened within a day or two. Being 
fond of her pen she wrote long letters to 
those she cared for, and it was not an un- 
common thing for me to receive from her 
several times a week a letter containing pre- 
cisely the same words and phrases, the same 
tidings and the same protestations of affec- 
tion. 

Why linger over these memories, except 
that they are so fragrant and have about 
them so sweet an aroma of tenderness^? It is 
as if they had been laid by in lavender. 
One of these days all these friends will meet 
again, and it will be as if there had been no 
break, only a little waiting time and then re- 
union. 


VIII 

PASSAIC SEMINARY 


I N my childhood the town of Paterson, sit- 
uated in a lovely valley, rimmed by green 
hills, was full of the hum of factory life. 
Cotton mills, silk mills and paper mills, 
foundries of one or another variety, and the 
stir and activity of a manufacturing centre 
were the distinctive features of the place. 
Operatives in great numbers lived there then 
as now, although at that time there were few 
working men from the discontented ranks of 
Europe. The thriving city has grown im- 
mensely in population and wealth. It has 
had repeated visitations of fire and flood from 
which it has emerged in renovated beauty. 
With independent self-respect, Paterson has 
accepted no outside assistance, however great 
the emergency or complete the disaster. 

At the time concerning which I write 
there were two private schools for girls in 
the place, one located in an aristocratic 
neighbourhood, of which the chief distinc- 
tion was a residence that crowned a small 
96 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


97 


eminence. This place bore the name of 
Colt’s Hill, and being surrounded by elaborate 
grounds open to the public if they were con- 
tented simply to walk about among the lawns 
and flower beds, was a real boon to people of 
all degrees. The mansion was large and 
stately, and on either side of the doorway 
there sat in a stone chair a life-sized figure in 
stone. The characters represented by these 
effigies were taken from the poems of Robert 
Burns, and they were a source of delight to 
children venturing up the broad steps and 
laying dimpled palms on the knees of the 
great immovable brown men. One school 
was situated not far from Colt’s Hill and was 
conducted by a lady who had travelled ex- 
tensively and was a personage of elegance 
and refinement. 

At the other end of the town in an equally 
retired and agreeable neighbourhood was an- 
other school, the one of which I think with 
a love that has never grown cold. 

Passaic Seminary was a long, low, white 
building on a bank of the river after which 
it was named. It stood on the rear of a lot 
back of the pleasant house that was the home 
of the three dear teachers whose influence 
did so much to shape the lives of the girls 


98 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


under their charge. These ladies seemed to 
the children they taught older than they 
really were, for children have no standard of 
measurement by which to judge the age of 
their elders. I have an idea that Miss Rog- 
ers may have been under thirty when she 
assumed the office of principal in the excel- 
lent private school that she and her sisters, 
Miss Elizabeth and Miss Jane, successfully 
conducted for nearly twenty years. Miss 
Jane, the youngest of the trio, married and 
left the school to the care of her older sisters, 
but this was after I had myself left it for 
another institution. 

These highly bred and gifted women were 
the daughters of a Baptist minister, the 
Reverend John Rogers. He and his wife were 
then living in the pleasant house on the 
front of the lot. It faced the street, and 
shielded from the observation of passers-by 
the school building in the garden behind it. 
A widowed daughter resided with them, and a 
son who was a physician. The latter, Dr. John 
Rogers, of Paterson, New Jersey, lived to an 
advanced age and passed away only a little 
while ago. Until he was over ninety he went 
unattended to Europe at his discretion to 
take part in medical conventions. Even 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


99 


when beyond that ancient land-mark he was 
held in honour by younger men of his pro- 
fession. 

Dr. Rogers, like all his family, was filled 
with a great devotion to the cause of for- 
eign missions. Although never possessed of 
wealth for many years he paid the salary of 
a foreign missionary as his contribution to the 
work he loved, saying that as he could not 
go in person to the Far East he would have 
his substitute there. This may appear to be 
a digression, but since the beginnings of my 
interest in and love for foreign missions date 
to the time when I attended what we girls 
called “ Miss Anna's school," it is pertinent 
in the reminiscences that I am setting 
down. 

The motive underlying every hour of life 
in those early school-days was a sense of re- 
sponsibility. The teachers were in the habit 
of answering our questions with quotations 
from the Bible. Thus a girl who had been 
a little heedless and had not done her best 
in recitation or exercises might find in her 
desk in the morning a slip of paper on which 
was inscribed the text, “ Whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do, do it with thy might," 
and then “ I thought you might be forgetting 


100 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


this injunction,” with the initials of the 
teacher who had noticed the delinquent. 

I once, as a child of eleven, left a ques- 
tion of conscience on the desk of Miss Jane, 
whose sweet face and charming manner made 
her our idol, and whose gracious loveliness 
we copied afar off. Looking to-day over 
some letters dated 1849, I trace in my hand- 
writing of that day a resemblance to hers, 
and I know that all the girls who knew her 
tried their best to imitate everything about 
her, from her noiseless, gliding step and her 
low-toned voice to her beautiful script as 
clear and fine as copper-plate, though not as 
stiff. I have not the least recollection of my 
question, what it was or why I could not 
settle it myself, but I kept the answer for 
years in the repository of all my treasures, 
an atlas that was my most beloved posses- 
sion. Miss Jane wrote as follows : “ Dear 

M , isn't this the rule you want? 

‘ Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever 
ye do, do all to the glory of God.' ” The 
youthful mentor could not have been far be- 
yond twenty, and the child to whom she 
wrote was eleven ! 

Once a frightful thunder-storm rushed 
down the valley, when the booming of the 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


101 


tempest, crash upon crash, was accompanied 
by vivid sheetsof lightning, and the hail-stones 
pattered on the roof like the rattle of musketry. 
We were very quiet until that summer storm 
had spent its force, and we were not a little 
alarmed. It was so dark that work was sus- 
pended, and we sat at our desks hushed and 
waiting. When the sun came out again Miss 
Anna talked to us, anticipating much teach- 
ing of to-day, about the folly of fear. She 
told us we were always in the care of God, 
and that could we only realize His presence 
we would feel as safe in the wildest storm as 
under the bluest summer sky. Then some- 
body went to the piano and the school rose 
and joined in a German song, the first stanza 
of which was, 

“It thunders, but I tremble not ; 

My trust is firm in God. 

His arm of strength Pve ever sought 

In all the way I’ve trod.” 

Our teachers insisted upon self-control as 
one of the most essential attributes of wom- 
anly character. “ It is no excuse,” Miss 
Anna would say, “ that you were off guard, 
that you did not think, that you forgot your- 
self. One’s business is to be on guard, 


102 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


and one must think before she speaks or 
acts.” 

The desks and school furniture were green. 
There was a row of desks in the middle of 
the room, while two others were nearer the 
windows. We could glance out and see little 
boats sailing up and down, and we loved to 
think of the river, never hurrying, never 
resting, tumbling with headlong swiftness 
indeed, over the rocks at the Passaic Falls, 
where a sheer descent of forty feet made rain- 
bows in the sun and frothed and foamed like 
a miniature Niagara. The tumult and fer- 
ment of the falls were not near our school. 
Where the river flowed past our door it was 
deep, smooth and calm. In my girlhood I 
finished a poem, “ The River,” the germ of 
which came to me as I sat in the schoolroom 
and watched the waves I loved. 


Far up on the mountain the river begins, — 

I saw it, a thread in the sun. 

Then it grew to a brook, and, through dell and 
through nook, 

It dimpled and danced in its fun. 

A ribbon of silver, it sparkled along 
Over meadows besprinkled with gold ; 

With a twist and a twirl, and a loop and a curl, 
Through the pastures the rivulet rolled. 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


103 


Then on to the valleys it leaped and it laughed, 
Till it stronger and stiller became ; 

On its banks the tall trees rocked their boughs 
in the breeze, 

And the lilies were tapers aflame. 


The children threw pebbles, and shouted with glee 
At the circles they made in the stream ; 

And the white fisher-boat, sent so lightly afloat, 
Drifted off like a sail in a dream. 


Deep-hearted, the mirth of its baby-life past, 

It toiled for the grinding of corn ; 

Its shores heard the beat of the lumberman’s feet, 
His raft on its current was borne. 


At inlet and cove, where its harbours were fair, 
Vast cities arose in their pride, 

And the wealth of their streets came from beau- 
tiful fleets, 

Forth launched on its affluent tide. 

The glorious river swept on to the sea, 

The sea that encircles the land ; 

But I saw it begin in a thread I could spin, 

Like a cobweb of silk, in my hand. 

And I thought of the river that flows from the 
throne, 

Of the love that is deathless and free, — 

Of the grace of his peace that shall ever increase, 
Christ-given to you and to me. 


Far up on the mountain, and near to the sky, 
The cup full of water is seen, 

That is brimmed till its tide carries benisons wide 
Where the dales and the meadows are green. 


104 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Is thy soul like a cup ? Let its little be given, 

Not stinted nor churlish, to One 
Who will fill thee with love, and His faithfulness 
prove, 

And bless thee in shadow and sun. 

One day last week I was talking with an 
old schoolmate who like myself was drilled 
in spelling, syntax and etymology, history 
and French, in Passaic Seminary. We agreed 
in thinking that while the instruction given 
was thorough, and the work required marked 
up to the highest standard of the period, yet 
we were more indebted to our teachers for 
ethical and literary culture than for the ac- 
cretion of facts. There was nothing of the 
method of Mr. Gradgrind in that school. 
The discipline was perfect. It was appar- 
ently taken for granted that every one in 
the schoolroom was there to learn. The least 
disorder was quelled by a glance of surprise 
from the desk, and when the roll was called 
at the end of each day the girls themselves 
reported any violations of the rules or deflec- 
tion from a straight line of duty of which 
they were aware. Their reports were ac- 
cepted, and a high standard of honour was 
inculcated and maintained. In the morn- 
ing at the tinkle of the bell the laughing, 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


105 


chatting groups separated and each girl took 
her seat. I can see Miss Anna to-day, a tall, 
slender figure with a grave and gentle face, 
brown hair smoothly banded and gathered 
in a knot at the back of her head, a sort of 
loose Psyche knot. She always wore black 
and her watch was attached to a slender gold 
chain about her neck. Miss Anna’s watch 
was like herself ; it kept perfect time. 

The school was opened by the singing of a 
hymn, the reading of a passage of Scripture 
and a little five-minute talk by the teacher, 
followed by a short prayer and “ Our Father 
in heaven,” in which we all joined. On two 
mornings in the week we had composition 
writing and exercises in phrases, the forma- 
tion of sentences, the supplying of proper 
words in blanks that were left to be filled, 
and the rendering equivalents for words that 
were dictated from the desk. Our juvenile 
essays ranged over a wide field. The school- 
mate to whom I talked told me that she re- 
membered as I do writing upon the attri- 
butes of God, His mercy, wisdom, justice, etc. 
That we were extremely homiletic and rather 
given to quoting the Scriptures and adding 
to texts our private comments, I am afraid is 
true. At all events a composition of mine 


106 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


that I venture to insert, a very didactic pro- 
duction to have emanated from a girl of 
twelve, seems to prove this : 

u Guard well thy thoughts, 

For thoughts are heard in heaven.” 

How careful we should be to watch our thoughts. 
At the last great day, when Christ, robed as a judge, 
upon His Father’s throne shall sit, not only the words 
and actions, but the most secret thoughts of men will 
be brought to light. David, the sweet Psalmist of 
Israel, exclaims, Psalm 139:2, “ Thou kno west my 
downsitting, and mine uprising, Thou understandest 
my thoughts afar off.” If then Jehovah sees our in- 
most thoughts, and even knows them before they 
enter our minds, should we not be careful to banish 
wicked imaginations from the lofty throne, where 
they would fain place themselves, and raise holy re- 
flections upon the Almighty to the much envied seat. 
If, however, there were no consequences arising from 
the fact that the Supreme Being knows the secrets of 
the heart, it would scarcely be a sufficient reason for 
us to guard well our thoughts. On the contrary, we 
are told that the doom of each will be sealed for 
eternity, according to the manner in which she has 
regulated her thoughts while here. 

As there are many different kinds of thoughts 
which should be guarded against, I will endeavour to 
mention a few of them. Solomon, the wisest man 
who ever lived, says, Proverbs 24 : 9, “ The thought 
of foolishness is sin.” Thus we see that the foolish 
and useless imaginations of the heart are just as sin- 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


107 


ful as wicked actions. David says, Psalm 94 : 11, 
“The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man that they 
are vanity.” Yes ! each imagination of the mind is 
imperfect and defiled in the sight of God. 

The thoughts of the wicked are particularly odious 
to the eye of God. He declares them to be altogether 
an abomination to Him. In Proverbs 11 : 20, He 
says, they who are froward in heart are particularly 
sinful, and as such are exceedingly deserving of His 
displeasure. Having seen that God hates the wicked 
and is angry with them every day, I will try to prove 
the certainty of their punishment. Solomon says in 
Proverbs 10 : 26, 27, 28 and 29, “ The fear of the Lord 
prolongeth days ; but the years of the wicked shall be 
shortened. The hope of the righteous shall be glad- 
ness, but the expectation of the wicked shall perish. 
The way of the Lord is strength to the upright ; but 
destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.” 

We are told in Matthew 15 : 19 that all evil 
thoughts proceed from the heart. Yes, that is the 
fountain of all evil. It is truly “deceitful above 
all things, and desperately wicked.” We should be 
careful to guard it well. 

Reflection upon God’s mercy in sending His only 
and Beloved Son to bleed and die for sinners, or upon 
the rules of duty laid down in the Bible, that blessed 
Book, are very suitable indeed. We should upon all 
occasions endeavour to fix our thoughts upon serious 
subjects, remembering that the very thought of folly 
is sin. When our thoughts wander to and fro upon 
the mountains of vanity, we should think of the 
wickedness of which we are guilty, in allowing them 
to do so. We should pray to God for assistance to 
restrain them, and He will grant it. 


108 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


I was a few days past my twelfth birthday 
when I wrote this amazing and formidable 
production. Some of its assertions ought to 
have received the ban of disapproval. 
Whether they did I do not know. I 
think, however, that the composition showed 
a good deal of industry in looking up 
references, and I have no doubt it 
could have been matched by many girls 
of an older period than mine, those, for 
instance, of the period of Harriet Beecher 
Stowe. 

About this time we were greatly interested 
in Dr. Judson and his missionary work in 
India. We girls resolved to have a mission- 
ary society of our own. We asked and ob- 
tained leave to use a small recitation room 
as a place for weekly meeting, occasionally 
varying it by an afternoon at one of our 
homes. In these meetings we read all that 
we could secure on missionary subjects, we 
contributed our offerings, saving our six- 
pences and shillings by self-denial, and 
finally making a quilt which was sold for us 
by our mothers at a church fair. 

At a missionary meeting held in Philadel- 
phia a dozen years ago, I met a lady who 
said to me, “ Have you forgotten Emma 


PASSAIC SEMINARY 


109 


F ? ” She had been a member of our lit- 

tle missionary band, and she told me that the 
very quilt made by our little fingers had been 
in the possession of her family for a long 
time. 

Every one of us longed to give her life in 
the service of Christ on a foreign shore. This 
is a not uncommon ambition of the young 
Christian, and if it lead to real consecration to 
missionary effort at home as well as abroad, 
it is a phase that enriches life. Our ac- 
quaintance with missionary literature was 
enlarged by the reading to which we listened 
during our sewing hours in school. Twice a 
week sewing by hand was very carefully 
taught. No gentlewoman was then supposed 
to be even half educated unless she had been 
made past mistress of needle craft. We were 
taught to hem, fell, overhand, gather and do 
everything else that belonged to the making 
of garments. Hemstitching, embroidering 
and working in wools were a part of the 
course of instruction in this branch. While 
we sewed Miss Jane read to us, and her 
choice was always biography or history. 
Naturally she turned to the topics that were 
of chief interest to her and her family, and 
so we were early made acquainted with the 


110 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


heroism and romance of missions. She 
varied this sometimes by reading poetry, 
but as most of the girls preferred prose, 
poetry was only an occasional choice. 


IX 


A SCHOOLGIRL IN THE FIFTIES 

W HOEVER recollects the externals 
of education in the middle of the 
nineteenth century must admit that 
significant changes have been made in the 
training of girls since then. Yet, are we 
quite sure that the real progress is worth all 
that it costs? Do we not sometimes find 
ourselves questioning whether after all the 
liberally educated woman of to-day is much 
in advance of her predecessor of fifty years 
ago? Our daughters and granddaughters 
have, it is true, possessed the advantage of 
an extended college curriculum ; are free, if 
they choose, to take postgraduate courses 
abroad and at home. They may generally 
share the education of young men, on equal 
terms. 

To hear the fragmentary talk of some of 
our juniors, one would imagine that we had 
received our training in the dark ages. It 
would be absurd to deny that pedagogy has 
111 


112 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


become a science, and that large and intelli- 
gent attention has, in these latter days, been 
bestowed upon the preparation of teachers 
for their work. Whoever, notwithstanding, 
falls into the mistake of supposing that in 
the early fifties girls had little work to do at 
school, and that the work required was not 
thorough, ought to be at once enlightened. 

I have heard people say in a superior fash- 
ion that the emphasis of education used to 
be placed on accomplishments, and that 
girls of good families were taught a little 
drawing and painting, a little instrumental 
music, a little French and a little Italian, 
and were then considered fit for society and 
the ordinary conduct of life. Note the 
diminutive. 

The phrase “ finishing school ” is not 
yet altogether obsolete. Within a twelve- 
month I have conversed with a cultivated 
American woman who warmly expressed 
the conviction that daughters and sons 
should be differently educated. “ My boys 
shall go to the university/’ she said. “ My 
girls shall have an all-round training at 
home, be well grounded in English and 
thoroughly taught in French, and then 
they shall have a year or two at the best 


A SCHOOLGIRL IN THE FIFTIES 113 


finishing school their father can afford. I 
am convinced/’ this friend went on to say, 
“ that to educate girls as we educate boys is 
a blunder that is likely to work injury to 
the future welfare of the family in America.” 

I do not share the opinion, nor would I 
sanction the practice of this thoughtful 
woman, and still I am willing to put on 
record my belief that it is possible to crowd 
too much into and be too strenuous in the 
four years allotted to girls in a college course. 
We did not go to college, but reviewing 
what we did, the results as I have seen them 
in the lives of a number of my friends and 
schoolmates have not been disappointing. 

The French and English school that I at- 
tended in Brooklyn, the diploma of which 
was my certificate of labor conscientiously 
performed, was situated on the corner of 
Fourth and South Ninth Streets in what is 
now the Eastern District of Brooklyn. 
Fourth Street has become Bedford Avenue, 
and the city has undergone great changes 
since those school-days. At that time there 
were few houses beyond our school, and the 
limit of occupation was reached when we 
came by a short walk to Christ Church in 
the fields. Long ago those open fields be- 


114 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


came busy streets. In my school-days we 
often picnicked there, and we dreamed many 
dreams and saw many visions as we sat in 
the noon-hour and talked in girl fashion 
of the future, under the shadow of the 
church. 

The principals of our school were Monsieur 
and Madame Paul Abadie. There were a 
number of assistant teachers. Those whom 
I remember best were the Reverend Charles 
Reynolds who taught mathematics, the 
Reverend John B. Finlay who had classes in 
Latin, Greek and English, and Madame her- 
self who was a very distinguished teacher 
with a gift for illuminating whatever we did 
not understand. Monsieur took the entire 
charge of the classes in French, and of him I 
shall speak later. There were other assist- 
ants, — a gifted young man who came on 
certain days and conducted certain classes of 
the older girls, and one or two extremely 
pretty young women whose work was in the 
primary grades. The young man referred to 
was, we understood, a student in a theolog- 
ical seminary who was preparing to become a 
missionary. We were interested in him be- 
cause of this "consecration on his part, and 
after school-days we followed his career with 


A SCHOOLGIRL IN THE FIFTIES 115 


affectionate thought when he went to a for- 
eign land where he spent his life. 

I have a vivid picture in my mind of one 
of the pretty girl-teachers who had wavy 
hair, with a tendency to curl, and who used 
to wear slippers with large buckles and very 
high heels. I can hear the little click of 
those heels on the floor as I write. I had 
nothing to do with her, but I fancied that 
she looked like a French Marchioness, a 
personage to whom in reality she bore no 
resemblance. 

Our work in English was not to be de- 
spised. We studied from cover to cover, 
digested and assimilated the English Gram- 
mar of Goold Brown. I have examined 
numerous text-books since I bade good-bye 
to this compendium of compact instruction, 
and have still to see the book that surpasses 
it in force, brevity and lucidity. Its arrange- 
ment was symmetrical, its rules were clear 
and terse, fastening themselves in the memory 
like nails in a sure place, and the notes and 
exceptions were worth studying and well 
taken. This grammar was peculiarly rich in 
references to literature, in quotations from the 
best authors and in examples that verified its 
statements. We were required literally to 


116 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


learn the book by heart, and in recitation re- 
peated it word for word. 

In parsing, a daily exercise, we went con- 
scientiously through Pope’s “ Essay on Man,” 
Thomson’s “ Seasons,” Cowper’s “ Task ” and 
Milton’s “ Paradise Lost.” I had already 
parsed through Thomson and Cowper at my 
earlier school* but once launched on Milton’s 
splendid sea, sails were set and vessels started 
for a wider voyage and richer freight. To 
have parsed through Milton with Dr. Finlay 
in the chair was to have received a new 
equipment in the handling of beautiful Eng- 
lish, and a new introduction to intellectual 
culture. The method was the reading of a 
passage which any young lady in the class 
might be called upon to do, while a class- 
mate would next be requested to give an 
analysis of the text, to state which clauses 
were contributory and which independent, 
while in effect the entire passage was sub- 
mitted to a winnowing and sifting process 
that left it forever impressed on the mind. 

Dr. Finlay was a Presbyterian minister 
from Belfast, Ireland. He was pastor of a 
church, but congregation and salary were 
small, and he had time and desire to act as 
a professor in our school. A graduate of 


A SCHOOLGIRL IN THE FIFTIES 117 


Dublin University with a later degree from 
Heidelberg, he was a man of very remarkable 
attainments and of almost unlimited reading. 
His study of history had been profound and 
the wealth of his knowledge was freely spent 
in our behalf. Of an uncommon height and 
leanness, with a homely but keenly intellectual 
face and an extremely abrupt manner, with 
a temper that flamed at a touch, he was not 
so great a favourite with the girls as he might 
have been had they appreciated their privi- 
leges in enjoying his instruction. In after 
years his pupils knew how much they were 
indebted to him for accuracy and for acquir- 
ing familiarity with tools. 

He taught us to depend on ourselves, to 
use reference books and lexicons and to go to 
the sources and the springs of literature. It 
was fine to hear him read a poem or a bit 
from an author he loved, and although it 
was sometimes a trial to undergo the severity 
of his criticism when essays and exercises 
were not what he expected and exacted, yet 
the fruit of such teaching was a permanent 
advantage. He always addressed his class 
as “ young ladies,” never omitting the for- 
mality of Miss to the individual, treating 
each in a manner of detachment a little diffi- 


118 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


cult to explain, while scrupulously deferring 
to us as “ young ladies,” that phrase being 
universal then. He taught us precisely as he 
would have taught our brothers, and had a 
way of coming down upon a culprit who 
had done badly when she might have done 
well, with the sternness of an offended judge. 

We studied history on a philosophical 
basis, and were obliged to write papers on 
the leading characters in each period, while 
we ascertained what influences moulded 
them and by what steps they came to power. 
We were familiar with ancient history, As- 
syria, Babylon, Greece and Home, and we 
discovered that modern lands and modern 
jurisprudence have been shaped by and de- 
veloped from the long story of the past. Our 
work was not made easy for us, but it was 
intensely interesting, and we learned what 
none of us have forgotten, how to study and 
where to go for information. 

Much stress was laid on correct spelling. 
Carelessness in this regard was considered 
shameful. Credit marks were multiplied if 
the writing handed in was fair and legible. 
One or two of my old schoolmates write to 
me in a hand so exquisitely beautiful and so 
easy to read that it is a distinction. The day 


A SCHOOLGIRL IN THE FIFTIES 119 


had not then dawned when it was thought a 
possible elegance in a young woman to send 
her friends a scrawl that would disgrace a 
house-maid. 

With the mathematical teacher I had little 
to do. He gave me up in despair, as did 
every one else who tried to drag me vi et armis 
beyond simple fractions. The whole field of 
arithmetic, the mysteries of algebra, the sub- 
tleties and intricacies of geometry were none 
of them for me. I long blushed at the odium 
of this confession, but I have been consoled in 
the discovery that Christina Rossetti, a poet 
whose garment’s hem I reverence, had a 
similar obtuseness in her childhood. I cared 
little for astronomy, but botany was a great 
delight. The stars were too far away, the 
flowers were at my feet. In middle life I 
took up with enthusiasm the study of the 
planets, and learned to watch with a great 
gladness the march of the constellations and 
the splendour of the golden lights burning 
in the sky, so steadfast, so ordered, so un- 
touched in their vast spheres by the little 
disturbances and turmoils below. 

Dr. Finlay was our instructor in Latin 
and Greek. I never made much progress in 
the latter, not getting farther than the Greek 


120 


FKOM MY YOUTH UP 


of the New Testament. In Latin we cov- 
ered as much ground as the girls do in col- 
lege to-day. French, being the language of 
the school and pervading its atmosphere, was 
taught as if it were a religion. When the 
annual examinations were in progress we 
were at concert pitch. Gold medals were 
offered for excellence in history, mathematics 
and languages. Books were also bestowed 
as premiums. We had an examining board 
composed of the clergymen of our part of 
Brooklyn, and as our examinations were 
both oral and written and were conducted 
in the presence of these gentlemen, they 
meant for us the high-water mark of the 
year. 

At the close of the summer term annually 
we had a public reception and entertain- 
ment. Dressed in white, our hair in braids 
or curls, we were seated together in one of 
the churches if, at the time, the school as- 
sembly room was thought too small to accom- 
modate the audience. The graduating class 
presented essays, there was a musical pro- 
gramme, and addresses were given by emi- 
nent educators or by the pastors in the 
vicinity. Flowers were always given to the 
graduates, and a popular girl would be laden 


A SCHOOLGIRL IN THE FIFTIES 121 


with spoils at the close of the evening. It 
was all ceremonious and old-fashioned and 
sweet. 

As I have again and again been present at 
commencement exercises in schools and col- 
leges I have thought how history repeats 
itself. The June fields this summer will be 
covered with a waving sheet of cloth of gold, 
the daisies will ripple in the sunshine and 
break in the wind like the foam of the sea. 
Last year there were daisies and there were 
daisies fifty years ago. There will be daisies, 
please God, as long as the world lasts, and in 
the summer-land of girlhood the beautiful 
succession will be the same. From century 
to century youth steps blithely forward and 
occupies the centre of the stage. In details 
commencements vary, but those I may at- 
tend this year will not be very unlike the 
one in which I was a graduate in the long 
ago. 

One difference appears rather striking to 
me in the retrospect. We girls were younger 
for our age than our successors are. We 
lived more intensely in the moment and 
thought less about the future than the girls 
of the twentieth century. In the early fifties 
girls were not as a rule anticipating the 


122 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


necessity of self-support. The avenues for 
the employment of women were few and 
well defined. A man trained his sons for 
business or a profession, but expected that 
his daughters after leaving school would 
help their mother at home until the time of 
their marriage. It was taken for granted 
that most girls would marry. At that period 
a girl was compassionated if she had no pros- 
pect of marriage at twenty-five. Many girls 
married at eighteen. Perhaps in consequence 
of the condition of things schoolgirls did their 
work and took their honours without much 
thought, if any, of earning money later on. 
They were not troubled about what they were 
going to be. The period of childhood lasted 
longer, and there was a shorter interval be- 
tween childhood and maturity than is the 
portion of present-day girlhood, 


X 


MY FRENCH PROFESSOR 

I MAGINE, if you can, a man of medium 
height, dark, impetuous, alert and em- 
phatic. Paul Abadie had been in the 
French Army and had a soldierly bearing. 
He spoke English fluently and correctly, but 
preferred his native tongue and used English 
only when obliged to do so by reasons of con- 
venience or politeness. He was much more 
indulgent to the girls than Madame permitted 
herself to be, and those who wished favours, 
excuses or half holidays were careful to con- 
sult him, and commit him to a pledge on 
their side before they interviewed Madame 
who was the real head of the school. 

We all understood that Monsieur Abadie, 
while a man of culture and an excellent in- 
structor, was in many ways more of a child 
than his pupils. He was a quick, fiery sort 
of man, impulsive in speech, fond of fun and 
an ardent patriot. Loving his own country 
with entire devotion, he had transferred his 
allegiance to ours, and he never tired of 
123 


124 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


praising the Republic and of enlarging upon 
the possibilities of its future. Yet he never 
lost completely the air of an exile. In our 
romantic little hearts we used to fancy that 
he was homesick, and we built castles in the 
air' in which we sent him rejoicing back 
across the ocean to find his own home in 
vine-clad France w r ith his practical American 
wife to keep him company and manage his 
affairs. Once a tall, slender young nephew 
of his, full of Parisian airs and graces, came 
to make his uncle a visit, and we girls greatly 
admired the lad and hoped he would remain 
to brighten up the lives of his kinsfolk. 
Charles, however, stayed only a short while 
and then disappeared from our view. 

Paul Abadie had a good share of the vanity 
of his nation, and prided himself on being an 
original genius. He liked to write verse, 
especially of an elegiac quality and form, 
varying it with lyrics of congratulation on 
occasion. If a friend had a wedding she re- 
ceived from him a poem written in her 
honour and copied in beautiful script. If a 
death occurred in the circle of his acquaint- 
ance he immediately dropped into verse and 
sent a poetical effusion to the survivors of 
the deceased. After a while he accidentally 


MY FRENCH PROFESSOR 


125 


learned to his chagrin that his poetry was not 
understood by its recipients, many of them 
reading no French and not caring to ask for 
a translation. I well remember the day 
when this sad truth made itself evident to 
my professor’s comprehension. He had a 
trick of vehement gesture, and although 
nearly bald, would run his fingers wildly 
through the thin hair that had once been a 
waving shock. “ But what shall I do, Mar- 
guerite?” he questioned me, sitting before 
him, sympathetic and distressed, yet strug- 
gling to hide from him the amusement I 
would have been ashamed to show. In those 
days I was often reproved for immoderate 
laughter, and this may be one reason why I 
never want to check the mirth of girlhood 
when it bubbles up from beneath the sur- 
face and can hardly be controlled. One is 
never twice in the early teens, and the effer- 
vescence and high spirits of a girl just out of 
short frocks are as cheerful as a sunbeam. 

“ What shall I do, Marguerite ? ” the dear 
soldier-teacher repeated, reading a note that 
he had received from a sincere, but tactless 
friend. I ventured a bit of counsel. “Why 
not translate your poetry into English ? ” 

“ But no, dear child, but no,” he answered, 


126 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


shaking his head. “ It would not then be 
poetry. It would lack the grace, the form, 
the action, the melody. I cannot turn my 
French into English and keep the stanzas in 
the proper shape.” 

I sat still and thought, and as impulsive 
then as I have been all my life, I ventured a 
proposition. There never was a day in my 
girlhood that I hesitated to undertake any- 
thing that offered itself to me as a thing 
worth attempting, and though I often failed, 
on the whole, I forged ahead rather faster 
than I could have done with a greater cau- 
tion. “ Let me translate your verses,” I said, 
boldly. “ I can make verses that rhyme, 
and no one will know that you did not do it 
yourself.” 

In his turn he hesitated, but though he 
must have been forty-five, he was not much 
more than fourteen in one sort of maturity, 
and the thought of the secret was something 
of a lure, while it furnished a shield for his 
self-esteem. “ We shall have to tell my 
wife,” he said. “ Nothing can be kept secret 
from her, but no one else need be informed. 
It will be good practice for you in transla- 
tion,” he added with perfect truth, and indeed 
it was. 


MY FRENCH PROFESSOR 


127 


My professor had an exaggerated admira- 
tion for courage of every description, and he 
poured it forth without stint on heroes who 
too often receive less consideration for valour 
than is their due. The heroism of the fire- 
men in the course of their duty seemed to 
him as worthy of celebration as that of sol- 
diers on the battle-field. 

There lies before me a little book published 
in 1852 bearing the title of “ The Fireman, 
and Other Poems.” The cover is bright red 
and it is embellished by a figure of a fireman, 
with helmet and trumpet, a ladder lying at 
his feet. Ornamental devices surround this 
central figure, and the book is gilt-edge. In 
the one hundred and thirty pages there are 
seventy-two poems of varying length, and in 
a modest preface disarming criticism the 
author begs indulgence for the style in which 
he has set down his impressions of this land 
of equality. He calls his verses ephemeral 
waifs floating over the sea of literature. 
They are indeed commonplace, but their in- 
tention is good and the sentiment invariably 
pure. The leading lyric celebrates the vir- 
tues of the fireman, and in a picturesque 
way describes an alarm of fire on a still night, 
the peril and terror of householders, and the 


128 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


arrival of the rescuers on the scene. Other 
poems are personal in their character, or are 
written for occasions. What pleasure I had, 
a girl of fourteen, in rendering into English 
these effusions of the childlike, simple- 
hearted Frenchman. 

Our classes in French were eagerly antic- 
ipated. We never knew beforehand in pre- 
cisely what mood we would find the professor. 
There were days when he was reticent, 
gloomy and disinclined to conversation. At 
such times the hour was devoted to exercises 
in dictation and to recitations of irregular 
verbs and efforts in construction. If we 
balked at an idiom or were conspicuously 
careless in pronunciation, or otherwise blun- 
dered, the professor grew grave and dis- 
couraged. I have known him to close the 
book and dismiss the class with a mournful 
wave of the hand and a word or two signify- 
ing that our depths of stupidity were beyond 
his power to fathom. Once in a while he 
would walk out and leave the class sitting 
uncertain what to do. His disapproval was 
evident enough, but the hour was still on and 
we had no choice except to remain seated. 
Usually Madame would come in, take the 
book and finish the lesson. It was on days 


MY FRENCH PROFESSOR 129 

when we had a good deal of conversation 
flashing back and forth like the old game of 
battledore and shuttlecock that our lessons 
were most successful. 

In one way and another we managed to ac- 
quire a considerable acquaintance with the 
beautiful language of France, and we made 
brief excursions into her literature. The 
style of teaching was erratic, but the atmos- 
phere enveloped us and the densest girl in 
our number was able to learn something, 
while those who were quick and receptive 
learned a great deal. Our accent was good 
and we learned how to discriminate between 
the cultivated speech of Paris and the dialect 
of the peasantry or the provinces, when we 
reached the time for practical tests. 

We girls were like others in our youthful 
indifference to conditions below the surface. 
In after years we knew that our French pro- 
fessor had often been a martyr to pain and 
had been long a sufferer from an obscure 
malady of which he finally died. The last 
year of his life was spent in invalidism, and 
he died in a hospital after a critical operation. 
Surgery had not made the advances in the 
fifties that are familiar to us, nor were opera- 
tions the ordinary affairs that they have be- 


130 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


come. Any one who submitted to a critical 
operation at that time was looked upon by 
friends as unusually brave. The knife was 
the extreme resort, not the beneficent agent 
that it has become in the hands of the skill- 
ful surgeon. The percentage of fatal cases 
was much larger then than now, and there 
was resignation to the worst in the minds of 
every one concerned when an operation was 
decided upon. 

Our professor took his fighting chance with 
the fortitude to be expected from one who had 
fought under the flag of his country. He 
died serenely in the Protestant faith to which 
he had always adhered. I have never 
thought of him as devout, although no irrev- 
erence marked his utterances public or pri- 
vate. He opened school each morning by 
reading prayers in French, and he undoubt- 
edly had a quiet acceptance of the will of his 
heavenly Father in every event of life. The 
school, however, was wholly different from 
the earlier one of which I have spoken. It 
was secular through and through. There was 
entire and conscientious performance of duty 
on the part of every teacher, and the stand- 
ards of excellence in the work of the pupils 
were not lowered by favouritism , nox was 


MY FRENCH PROFESSOR 


131 


there any slurring or shirking tolerated in the 
school. If there was a lack it was what I have 
implied. The perfume of devout piety that 
lingers in memory like a waft of rose-leaves or 
lavender when I think of my days in Pas- 
saic Seminary is wanting when I am look- 
ing at the later school. Good manners were 
exacted, and an infraction of politeness was 
a breach of the higher morality, yet ethically 
we were not in every particular what we 
should have been. 

I received and accepted without an in- 
stant's hesitation all sorts of assistance in the 
mathematics that I did not understand, and 
in return I not infrequently wrote in entirely 
different styles the compositions of half my 
classmates. Neither they nor I gave a 
thought to the irregularity of these pro- 
ceedings, and as no one suspected us we 
were not questioned. Our sense of honour 
was a little blunted, and this happened 
oftener in the recitation room of our 
French professor than when we sat before 
the keen and profoundly intellectual man 
who taught us English. He was North of 
Ireland to the core, and any one who knows 
that stock knows that it stands for truth 
and faith through every circumstance. 


132 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


After the death of Professor Abadie the 
school was disbanded. Twice in later years 
it has been my happy privilege to meet 
Madame who is still living at a great age. 
Not very long ago I received a letter from 
her written in the same beautiful hand that 
characterized her in her prime, and ex- 
pressed with the gentle formality that was 
the graceful accomplishment of well-bred 
women in her youth. 

The surviving graduates of that French 
and English school are scattered far and wide. 
Most of the girls married early, lived happily 
and achieved success in the profession of 
home-maker. Several of the loveliest of our 
number died early. When at intervals those 
of us who are left meet in one another's 
houses, we are conscious of so blithe a pulse, 
so quick a thrill that it is hard for us to 
accept the strange fact that we are grand- 
mothers, and that the roseate days of youth 
belong to the past. It is our natural impulse 
to say to one another, if there are two or three 
of us, “Come, girls," just as we used to, to 
the amusement of the young folk, who per- 
ceive the anachronism between girlhood and 
white hair. 

In looking through the little red book, 


MY FRENCH PROFESSOR 


133 


I find the stanzas addressed to the fireman 
too antiquated for quotation, and most of 
the congratulatory and elegiac poems are the 
same. As a specimen of my professor’s love 
for nature and for his mother I give two ex- 
tracts. His work was as literally rendered 
as it was possible to do. 


NIGHT AFTER A STORM 

The stars illume the mountain tops, 

And from their giddy height 
Pour down upon the boundless fields, 

A soft and rosy light. 

The wind that moaneth through the trees, 
Hath a sweet sound to me, 

A voice of music in the air, 

A heaven-born melody. 

The perfume of a thousand flowers 
Up to the heavens arise, 

And mingling with the morn’s soft rays, 
Sail through the azure skies. 

A thousand dew-drops clear and bright 
Lie in each grassy bed, 

And bending ’neath the shining weight, 
The violet lifts its head. 

From all on earth — the trees — the flowers, 
From all that God has given, 

Come thankful songs of joy and praise, 
And gratitude to heaven. 


134 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 

SONG— WHAT I LOVE 

Hove the swelling song of birds, 

Amid the forest trees, 

The soft and perfumed breath of morn, 

The sighing evening breeze. 

I love calm nature’s soft repose 
At twilight hour, at day’s sweet close. 

I love the rosy, smiling sun, 

I love each golden ray, 

I love each thing it shines upon, 

The lark whose joyous lay 
Rings out upon the clear calm air, 

The waving trees, and all things fair. 

I love the dark and gloomy night, 

I love its sombre hue ; 

To me it seems as fair and bright, 

And pure as Heaven’s own blue. 

And when thy moon pours down her light, 
How beautiful thou art — oh, night ! 

I love to think of her who watched 
With her soft eyes so mild, 

With all a mother’s ceaseless care 
The footsteps of her child. 

O ! would that thro’ life’s gathering storm, 
Might gleam again that angel form. 


XI 


DREAMS AND FANCIES 
LL through our childhood my sister 



and I dwelt in a fairy-land of our 


^ own. In my girlhood this dream- 
world was shared by a single alter ego, a 
friend who like myself could at will step out 
of the beaten paths of daily routine into an 
imaginary realm peopled at our pleasure by 
the creations of our fancy. I must have been 
fifteen when the fanciful entirely gave way 
to the actual, and I wandered no more in 
tropical groves and gardens, lingered no 
longer in ancient castles, and tarried neither 
at morning nor evening in beautiful regions 
that had no existence. 

My sister’s name was Isabel, and during 
the golden years of childhood we had one 
mind and heart between us. Wherever 
one went there went the other, and while 
each had her own special allies and chums, 
none of these entered into the inner circle 
behind whose barrier we lived apart. I can- 
not remember the time when Belle and I had 


135 


136 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


not our cabalistic signs and tokens, our words 
that were spells and our mystic passes and 
hand-clasps. We were fortunate enough to 
have a great mysterious garret that furnished 
us with a place of withdrawal from those 
about us, and whether the sun streamed in 
the front windows over the end where we 
kept our books, dolls and other treasures, or 
the rain beat on the roof and the darkness 
gathered, we were supremely happy there. 
We ceased to bear our usual names when we 
set our feet on the attic stairs. We had other 
names that we had chosen for ourselves, 
names that had for us a great dignity, and 
our garret was a palace, and in it we enacted 
a drama that continually changed and un- 
folded in which there were women looking 
out of lofty windows to watch knights riding 
in armour to distant fields of battle, while at 
times the medieval castle would be besieged 
and we would encounter perils within and 
fears without. 

We believed in the fairies and were never 
in the least surprised at the rustle of their 
garments or their appearance on the scene. 
Tiny trolls and elves, good fairies and bad 
fairies, queens and princesses, highway rob- 
bers and bandit chiefs came at our call and 


BREAMS AND FANCIES 


137 


dissolved into thin mist when we were tired 
of them, during the swiftly gliding years 
when we were simply in the eyes of our elders 
two children going to school. 

I would not resign for any pleasure I have 
enjoyed in later days the exquisite rose-tinted 
memory of that life of dream and fancy. At 
pleasure we were clothed upon with robes of 
radiant white, and wore wreaths upon our 
hair, and satin shoes with silver buckles on 
our feet. We made singularly little use of 
visible properties in our childish play-acting, 
although there was an oaken chest from 
which we now and then drew old-fashioned 
clothing in which we masqueraded. 

We must have been indisposed to take 
older people into our confidence, for no one 
was ever told anything about our intercourse 
with Lady Clare or Griselda or Prince Rupert 
or any of the cavaliers and dames, the gallants 
and ladies who were our constant associates 
when we were alone. I wearied first of the 
dream life, and it began to lose its charm for 
me about the time that I crossed the boundary 
line of the teens, although I did not wholly 
leave the enchanted borders until I was a 
little older. My sister, being younger, felt 
bereft and solitary when I ceased to be ab- 


138 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


sorbed in the interest that had hitherto be- 
longed to us both. 

A slightly different sort of dream-life was 
that in which my schoolmate, Anna Ran- 
dolph, had as much to do as I. We would 
take long walks together, planning our future 
and adorning it with everything desirable 
that vast wealth and splendid opportunities 
could secure. I said in the last chapter that 
girls used to remain young longer than they 
do in these days of a forcing process. Cer- 
tainly it was strange that two young girls, 
each fond of study, each eager to shine in her 
department, and each regarded as a leader by 
her companions, should walk and talk day 
by day, so engrossed by schemes that could 
have had no foundation, that twilight would 
gather before they knew that the sun was 
going down. We would write books that 
should bring us world-wide fame, we would 
travel under every sky on the globe ; we 
would walk through innumerable picture 
galleries and bring home the pictures we 
liked best ; we would wear gold chains and 
diamond tiaras, and in our plans we had the 
purse of Fortunatus and the luck of Alladin’s 
lamp. The foolish little pastime did us no 
harm, and there dawned a day when sud- 


DREAMS AND FANCIES 


139 


denly for no reason discoverable we both 
tired of our pageantry and returned to prosaic 
duty and the world of our homes and school. 

Following this peculiar dream-world we 
entered on another psychological period. It 
might be more strictly correct should I say 
that I did. I remember a great discontent 
with my youthful appearance. I desired to 
be thought much older than I was, arranged 
my hair in the most grown-up style, and 
deliberately chose an unbecoming dress of 
dark brown instead of a dainty blue one for 
the reason that the brown one would make 
me look older. In the church that we at- 
tended there was a man who must have been 
in the later twenties. I knew nothing of 
him except his name, but he was tall, fair- 
haired and blue-eyed, and I thought him 
like a Norse god. He sometimes took part 
in prayer-meeting, and I loved the music 
of his voice. He was entirely unaware of 
my existence and was engaged to be married 
to a very lovely young girl who taught a 
Sunday-school class near mine, for I had by 
this time arrived at the eminence of teach- 
ing a little class myself. I can remember 
the admiration I felt for the man whom I 
had selected to be my hero, and the unspoken 


140 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


hope I had that I might one day know him. 
I used to dress myself on Sundays and for 
the mid-week meeting with a hidden thought 
that possibly before the day or the evening 
should be over I might become acquainted 
with this peerless being. A day arrived 
when we were introduced, but he was evi- 
dently not impressed and passed me by with 
careless courtesy. When I heard that he 
was to be married I felt a sense of grievance 
and disappointment, and I wondered much 
how any one so gifted and kingly could con- 
descend to accept as a bride a diminutive 
person who had in my judgment little to 
recommend her. 

Girls often go through phases of this kind. 
They belong to the mystery of awakening 
womanhood. Two or three years later Mr. 

and Mrs. became my friends. By 

that time I had emerged from the land of 
the dream and the vision, and I found them 
sensible and cultivated people, in no way 
remarkable except for kindness and good- 
ness. The Norse god wholly disappeared, 
and the plain, pushing man of business took 
his place, while I learned to regard him as 
most fortunate in having persuaded the most 
winsome of women to be his wife. 


DREAMS AND FANCIES 


141 


A poem written years after had its tiny 
germ in the old oak chest. I give it here. 

“ELIZABETH, AGED NINE” 

Out of the way in a corner 
Of our dear old attic room, 

Where bunches of herbs from the hillside 
Shake ever a faint perfume, 

An oaken chest is standing — 

With hasp and padlock and key — 

Strong as the hands that made it 
On the other side of the sea. 

When the winter days are dreary, 

And we’re out of heart with life, 

Of its crowding cares are weary 
And sick of its restless strife, 

We take a lesson in patience 
From the attic corner dim, 

Where the chest holds fast its treasure, 

A warder dark and grim : 

Robes of an antique fashion — 

Linen and lace and silk — 

That time has tinted with saffron, 

Though once they were white as milk ; 
Wonderful baby garments, 

Broidered, with loving care, 

By fingers that felt the pleasure 
As they wrought the ruffles rare. 

A sword, with the red rust on it, 

That flashed in the battle- tide, 

When, from Lexington to Concord, 

Sorely men’s hearts were tried ; 

A plumed chapeau and a buckle, 

And many a relic fine ; 

And all by itself the sampler, 

Framed in its berry and vine. 


142 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Faded the square of canvas, 

Dim is the silken thread — 

But I think of the white hands dimpled, 
And a childish, sunny head ; 

For here in cross and tent stitch, 

In a wreath of berry and vine, 

She worked it a hundred years ago, 
“Elizabeth, aged nine.” 

In and out in the sunshine 
The little needle flashed, 

And out and in on the rainy day 
When the sullen drops down plashed, 
As close she sat by her mother — 

The little Puritan maid — 

And did her piece on the sampler 
Each morn before she played. 

You are safe in the crystal heavens, 
“Elizabeth, aged nine,” 

But before you went you had troubles, 
Sharper than any of mine. 

The gold-brown hair with sorrow 
Grew white as drifted snow, 

And your tears fell here, slow-staining 
This very plumed chapeau. 

When you put it away, its wearer 
Would need it never more, — 

By a sword-thrust learning the secrets 
God keeps on yonder shore. 

But you wore your grief like glory ; 

Not yours to yield supine, 

Who wrought in your patient childhood, 
“Elizabeth, aged nine.” 

Out of the way in a corner, 

With hasp and padlock and key, 
Stands the oaken chest of my fathers 
That came from over the sea. 


DREAMS AND FANCIES 


143 


The hillside herbs above it 
Shake odours faint and fine, 

And here on its lid is a garland 
To “ Elizabeth, aged nine.” 

For love is of the immortal, 

And patience is sublime, 

And trouble’s a thing of every day, 

That toucheth every time ; 

And childhood sweet and sunny, 

Or womanly truth and grace, 

In the dusk of the way light torches, 

And cheer earth’s lowliest place. 

Another subtle experience might be chron- 
icled as a dual personality. When I was 
a tiny child it strangely consoled me in tran- 
sient troubles to think of a tall and beauti- 
ful girl who lived in the neighbourhood. 
My ideals always had fair hair and blue 
eyes, and I never remember being fond in 
early days of a heroine with raven hair or a 
hero of swarthy complexion. My golden- 
haired beauty was dressed in blue or pink 
and she had a low little rippling laugh like 
the lilt of a brook in the spring. “ There 
goes a pretty girl,” my father would say, 
when she passed the door, and my mother 
would follow her with an approving smile. 
I used to say to myself, if I had a childish 
trial, “ Emily is not unhappy, Emily has 
everything she wants, Emily can go on a 


144 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


visit, Emily is not disappointed/' and in a 
subtle, unexplainable way the cloudless joy 
of the triumphant Emily made up for my 
misfortunes. I could bear to be hurt or 
scolded or misunderstood, so long as Emily 
was the admired and beloved of all. 

As I grew up I learned to keep intact a 
second self, not Emily nor another, but just 
my own replica, who walked in tranquil 
beauty, serene and undisturbed no matter 
what agitations might be shaking me. This 
second unsuspected double maintained her 
place unruffled when the other self was an- 
noyed, dismayed or possibly remorseful. I 
do not know how to make clear to the reader, 
who does not comprehend it without words, 
the secret of this dual personality, but it 
abides with me still, and I am fain to think 
that it abides with many of us. Here we sit 
toiling over columns of figures, stitching on 
the sewing-machine, patching the knees of a 
laddie's trousers and giving attention to the 
ordinary affairs of an ordinary day. We are 
kneading bread in the kitchen, or kindling a 
fire on the hearth ; we are presiding at a 
breakfast table and regretting that the toast 
is burnt and the coffee not quite clear, and 
all the while we may be miles away, on a 


DREAMS AND FANCIES 


145 


ranch with a dear one, on a ship that sails 
the sea, in South Africa or Japan, the part 
of us that is away as distinctly another self 
as the part that is here. We do not need to 
talk in the jargon of the day about astral 
bodies or psychic phases to throw light on 
experiences so common, for the truth is of 
every-day occurrence and is proved in our own 
self-consciousness that we are as frequently 
two persons as one. But for this dual per- 
sonality we might not so easily go unscathed 
through the conflicts of life, so serenely 
meet rebuffs, and so buoyantly bear reverses. 

As a girl I was continually in the habit, so 
to speak, of being in two places at one and 
the same time, and I have not outgrown the 
habit with the years. The inner self can- 
not be touched or flawed by the stormy 
winds of life. It is like a flower behind a 
thin pane of glass or a grain within the husk. 
One day the thin crystal may break or the 
husk may fall away, and the inner self, the 
real self, with no hint of age, no scar, no 
spot or stain, will go onward, thanks to the 
Friend whose love has never slept, into the 
glory and peace of the life eternal. 

The dark-eyed Southern girl, who was 
tenant with me in castles in Spain, returned 


146 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


with her family to Virginia, and before many 
years had passed became the wife of a 
Presbyterian minister. During the Civil 
War her home near Richmond was the 
scene of much perturbation and anxiety, so 
close to the storm-centre of the Confederacy 
that successive parties of soldiers, both Union 
and Confederate, tramped across its fields and 
found shelter under its roof. The house- 
hold treasures of silver and jewelry were 
buried for safe-keeping in a grove near the 
house, and there Anna deposited with other 
souvenirs a picture of me like the one on the 
cover on this book. She was the daintiest, 
most flower-like of girls with something of 
the saintly devotion of a cloistered nun. 
When, years after girlhood, I visited her in 
West Virginia in a little manse among the 
mountains, I found her the busy, practical 
wife and mother, with advice ever ready for 
those who sought it, while every line of her 
countenance bore witness that she had en- 
dured hardships and had come from the 
struggle of life splendidly victorious. 

In the field where they laboured, the min- 
ister and herself had done home mission- 
ary work all their lives. The manse was 
simply furnished, with no superfluities, but 


DREAMS AND FANCIES 


147 


the study was amply supplied with books, the 
walls from ceiling to floor hidden by volumes 
of the best literature, to which additions 
were often made. 

Of my friend’s children, three are to-day 
in the medical profession, one is a lawyer, 
another an editor, and all are honourably 
fulfilling responsible positions in life. She 
and her husband still live in the mountain- 
land with children and grandchildren around 
them, and before long they will arrive at the 
mile-stone of their golden wedding. I am 
sure if I questioned her to-day, she would 
tell me that she felt, notwithstanding the 
number of her birthdays, little older than 
when she and I strolled together and had 
dreams and visions in the shadow of Christ’s 
Church in the fields. This, too, is another 
proof of that dual personality that is so real 
and so baffling. 


XII 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 
HE year 1854 began auspiciously 



and its first day was one of gaiety 


and good cheer in our home. New 
Year’s Day was with us the great day of the 
twelvemonth, surpassing Christmas in the 
family annals. We had not yet wholly 
lost an intangible feeling that paying too 
much honour to Christmas was making a 
concession to the Church of Rome, and 
though there was to be sure an exchange of 
gifts and some festivity on Christmas, the 
whole-hearted keeping of a holiday was re- 
served for the first of January. Then we 
watched with eagerness for the first foot over 
the threshold, and all day long in accordance 
with the old custom of Manhattan callers 
came and went. 

A table was sumptuously spread, and each 
guest was invited to partake of refreshment 
from noonday when the calling began, until 
almost midnight when it ended. There was 
much to be said for this old fashion of ex- 


148 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


149 


changing greetings at the opening of a new 
year, and there was a flavour of real sweet- 
ness in the meetings of friends who perhaps 
saw one another seldom and cemented their 
friendship by talks of auld lang syne as they 
wished one another a Happy New Year. 

My sister and I were still looked upon as 
children, yet we had our own share in the 
pleasure of the New Year, and in the even- 
ing of this particular anniversary we had a 
little party of our own. The second of Janu- 
ary used to be called Ladies’ Day, and for the 
first time in my recollection we went forth 
to pay formal calls on its afternoon. We 
felt most important when we indulged in this 
grown-up occupation. 

The holiday once over we settled down to 
our usual routine, and nothing occurred to 
make one day different from another until 
early in February my father suddenly died. 
There had been no warning, no apparent phys- 
ical weakness and not an hour of illness. He 
had enjoyed, as he always did, the Sabbath 
day, attending church morning and evening 
and retiring in health, not even tired. Thus 
he fell asleep and was translated, for his 
waking was in heaven. The dismay and 
consternation that fell upon us when we 


150 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


realized that he was no more are beyond my 
power to describe. It was the first heavy 
shadow that darkened my life, and yet it was 
a shadow that had its other side of sunshine. 
We had no doubt of immortality, no doubt 
that the dear one was living and loving still, 
and no doubt that we should meet him again. 
The household drew very close together in 
that chill February, and as we wore our deep 
mourning we felt solitary and apart and were 
aware that life had grown sombre and that 
inevitably changes of one or another kind 
would come to pass. 

Grief, though profound, does not very long 
oppress the young. They are too near the 
source of being, have too much vitality and 
elasticity to continue under its sway. We 
were helped and cheered by the presence in 
our home of my mother’s only surviving 
brother who returned with us from my 
father’s funeral and never again left us, 
so long as he lived. Of all true-hearted, 
knightly, self- forgetting men, he remains to 
me the type. He loved my mother with an 
absolute devotion, and stood by her in her 
widowhood with a fidelity and gentleness 
that I have never seen equalled. To this 
day, I can hardly think of him without a 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


151 


thrill of pride and a sense of gratitude for 
which I have no words. “ A brother is born 
for adversity.” My mother realized this as 
she was relieved of every possible care, and 
thenceforward shielded and sheltered during 
the twenty-five years in which she was spared 
to us. 

David Chisholm had been educated for the 
ministry, the intention not so much his own 
as that of his grandfather, David Kirkaldy. 
He was a man of broad culture and wide 
reading, of inflexible rectitude and rare un- 
selfishness. Instead of entering the profession 
to which he did not feel that he was divinely 
called, he gave his life to business. He was 
young when he laid aside other plans and 
purposes, and without a hint that he was 
sacrificing any hope, came to stay with his 
sister and her children. It was not until in 
old age he was suddenly summoned to the 
home-land that those who were left learned 
from papers in his desk that he had made a 
large personal sacrifice for their sakes. They 
wished it had been otherwise, and wondered 
at their own blindness. Until I meet him 
again he will be united in my thought of all 
that is noble and fine with the father who 
was the idol of my early years. 


152 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Youth, as I have said, cannot be crushed 
by sorrow. The rebound comes quickly. 
Although a dear face may be missed from 
the table, and a familiar voice be silent, 
there is on every side the pressure of life 
and hope. The future beckons when we are 
young. It was my first real introduction to 
maturity when as the elder daughter I was 
obliged to shield my mother even from sym- 
pathetic callers in the first weeks of her 
anguish. I was still attending school, but 
it seemed to me that I looked several years 
older in my mourning dress than in the 
colours laid aside. Nevertheless, a great sur- 
prise was in store for me, when one day a 
visitor was announced who particularly asked 
if he might see me alone. The man was in 
some way associated with my school life. I 
vaguely remember what he had taught, but 
I had been a pupil in one or two of his 
classes. He had drifted into our home in 
the evening during that autumn and winter, 
and had been received as a friend of the 
family. What were my amazement and em- 
barrassment when confronted without a hint 
of preparation with my first offer of marriage. 
When at last I understood it I must have 
made it plain to my friend that I could not 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


153 


share his life. He went away not, I fancy, 
with that excess of disappointment that leads 
to heartache, his comment being on my re- 
fusal, “ Well, you are very young, but it 
would have been suitable, and I did think 
that your love for the cause of missions 
would have made you willing to be the wife 
of a foreign missionary.” In less than three 
months my suitor crossed the ocean to a 
foreign field where he was eminently suc- 
cessful, and in the life to which he was con- 
secrated he had a comrade by his side. He 
had not met her on the day when he bade 
good-bye to me, but love does not always 
need to be built on a foundation of long 
acquaintance. He and his wife are not liv- 
ing now, and no one reading this will have 
a clue to their identity. The little episode 
helped to make me still more grown up than 
I had been before. 

“ What kept you so long talking with Mr. 
Blank? ” said my mother. “ I will tell you 
by and by,” I said, “ when we are alone.” 
“He showed little judgment,” was her com- 
ment when I revealed the matter to her in 
the confidential hour before bedtime. 

In the quiet spring days after my father's 
death I spent a great deal of time writing. 


154 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


I preferred to write with an atlas or portfolio 
in my lap, and would sit on the stairs or 
beside the window or on the edge of the bed 
to jot down couplets and quatrains, or copy 
from memory quotations that haunted me. 
I filled numbers of little blank books and 
scribbled on quantities of foolscap, spending 
most of my spare time in writing for my 
own satisfaction reviews of the books I was 
reading. I remember writing an elaborate 
essay on the life and work of David Brain- 
erd, whose memoir deeply impressed me. A 
friend who happened to see this attempt at 
book reviewing advised me to keep on in 
that line but gave the excellent counsel not 
to offer anything for publication until my 
hand had grown stronger and my skill 
greater. He said to me in substance, “ You 
would better try to write less rather than 
more, and you will form your style best by 
reading the great masters of literature.” This 
advice I have frequently passed on to young 
people who think they can write. I have 
learned that it is as well to guard it by the 
addition that it does little good merely to 
read for a utilitarian end, and no good what- 
ever to read what one neither likes nor 
understands. 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


155 


As I have said, I read all that I could get 
and had little difficulty in understanding 
anything that appealed to me, but I have 
often seen young girls and older women, too, 
absorbed in a painful pursuit of culture that 
has borne little fruit. The novice in literary 
work cannot do better than to read exhaust- 
ively along the lines of enjoyment, not 
wasting time over authors who bore her. 
We find our masters and teachers after a 
while, and each period naturally has its fa- 
vourites. 

Notwithstanding my friend’s counsel I 
kept on writing, but I had not then any 
particular ambition to see myself in print. 
That ambition stirred in me two years later. 

I wrote by fits and starts, sitting on the 
stairs, as I have said, or on the edge of my 
bed, in bits of time not otherwise pre- 
empted, the life-story of a lovely child who 
had been often in our home and who was 
early gathered into the upper fold. I con- 
fided to no one my intention to write this 
little life-story, but I kept on until I had 
filled about one hundred pages of manu- 
script. I wrote on foolscap paper tinted 
blue. When the book, for such I meant it 
to be, was completed, I sent it with a little 


156 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


note, still keeping my secret to myself, to 
the Presbyterian Board of Publication in 
Philadelphia. The manuscript may have 
been acknowledged, but I seem to remember 
nothing about this. 

Months passed, six or eight, and one day 
an expressman left a parcel addressed to me 
at the door. It contained, 0 wonder of won- 
ders, twelve copies of a bound book entitled 
“ Little Janey,” and the postman the same 
day brought me a letter in which was a 
check for forty dollars. This was the first 
money my pen ever earned, and I trod on 
air and knew in myself the unfolding of 
wings. The surprise and delight of the 
family were as great as mine, and we had an 
animated discussion as to what should be 
done with my wealth. Arguments were pre- 
sented in favour of putting the money in the 
savings-bank, of spending it at once, of in- 
vesting it in the purchase of books, and I as 
the pleased possessor of the magic slip of pa- 
per wavered now in one direction, and again 
in another, irresolute as to my decision. To 
put the money in the bank was much too 
prosaic a proceeding, yet to fritter it away 
on trifles or even to spend the whole of it on 
books was to fly in the face of the public 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


157 


opinion of the combined household. Fi- 
nally, my mother’s word prevailed with me. 
u It is yours to do what you like with,” she 
said, “ and it came to you as if it had 
dropped from the sky. You cannot call 
your little book work, for really writing it 
was just like play. If I were you I would 
spend this forty dollars in buying some 
silver that you can keep and always look 
upon as the first fruit of your talent.” This 
I did. Alas for the transient nature of the 
possession thus purchased. I had the silver 
for perhaps a score of years, and then it was 
stolen by a burglar, and never recovered. 
A time-worn yellow copy of “ Little Janey ” 
is on a book shelf, and it recalls to me the 
keen sweetness of my first draught of literary 
success. 

A little later the Board of Publication sent 
me a commission, — one hundred pictures for 
which I was asked to write one hundred 
brief juvenile stories. I fulfilled my part of 
the contract and my check for this not very 
difficult task was larger than before. This 
time the Board sent me a check for one 
hundred dollars. Even now I did not 
devote myself with much seriousness to 
writing. For one thing, I was busy in other 


158 


FKOM MY YOUTH UP 


directions. I was studying music for which 
I had no aptitude and over which I wasted 
much precious time. Also I was taking 
lessons in water colours, my teacher, an ab- 
rupt and candid spinster, openly scoffing at 
my attempts at colour and composition. 

With immense self-confidence I attacked 
an art that was enlisting the attention of 
many of my girl friends, the art of em- 
broidery on satin. This would not be worth 
mentioning here, but for a reminiscence. It 
occurred to me that I might easily teach 
embroidery, and in my imagination it ap- 
peared desirable to have about me a group 
of children to whom I could impart the 
knowledge I had gained. 

That I to whom needle craft has been a 
lifelong mystery should have had the te- 
merity to suppose that I could teach artistic 
embroidery looks, at this distance, amusing. 
I had acquired the theory and knew how the 
thing was done, although my skill in the 
doing would not have made me a prize win- 
ner in a competition. With unshaken be- 
lief in my own ability to accomplish what- 
ever I undertook I wrote notes to the 
mothers in the neighbourhood or called 
upon friends and I soon had an afternoon 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


159 


class of interested children whose perform- 
ances discredited neither themselves nor me. 
This was my initiation as a teacher. 

Out of my embroidery class gradually 
grew a little school that was conducted with 
gratifying results for two years. Being less 
than eighteen when I planned it and under 
twenty when I gave it into other hands, I 
have no reason to be ashamed of my girlish 
enterprise. My pupils were of various ages, 
from six to sixteen, and I had perhaps thirty 
all told. I taught them with enthusiasm, 
and I had one or two assistants who took 
charge of the studies for which I had no 
taste. The school had its entertainments at 
stated intervals, inclusive of a May-queen 
cantata for which I wrote original poems, 
and which a musical friend conducted for 
me, and of a Christmas performance of some 
kind which went off to every one’s satisfac- 
tion. Everything relating to this little school 
has grown hazy and indistinct, for it was very 
informal and much like little schools that I 
later saw carried forward in Southern vil- 
lages. The days of kindergartens were not 
yet, so little children were taught to read 
and write, and the older ones were prepared 
for more advanced instruction. I had pupils 


160 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


in English and French who made good prog- 
ress, and the parlours of the house being 
given up to me during school hours, the 
girls sat about the room or around a table, 
and at all events did not entirely lose their 
time. When school was over for the day 
the parlours resumed their original social uses. 

This part of my girlhood was only a brief 
episode that came to an end in the June of 
1858. In the October of that year I was 
married. 

My husband, George Sangster, was a native 
of Aberdeen, Scotland. A year before we 
met I attended a Sunday-school convention 
at which he was one of the speakers. The 
exercises had been prolonged to a rather 
late hour and every one was tired when the 
last speaker stepped to the front of the plat- 
form. His address was masterly, terse and 
eloquent, with no little originality and 
humour. I had always loved the peculiar 
accent of Scotland, accustomed to hearing it 
as I had been all my life. As I walked 
home I said to the friends who were with me, 
“ the man who came last redeemed the entire 
evening.” 

When we met, as we did, in the subsequent 
year, he was in the company of a lifelong 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


161 


friend who introduced us without the slight- 
est thought that we would be more than 
casual acquaintances. I think I was most 
attracted to the man who was to become my 
husband because he seemed very desolate 
and lonely. His little daughters in black 
from head to foot for their mother whose 
death had left their home like an unsheltered 
nest, tugged at once at my heart-strings. I 
know now that the maternal element has 
been the strongest and deepest part of my 
nature, and that it was the desire to mother 
the little motherless children that uncon- 
sciously drew me to the man who became first 
my lover and then my husband. 

We were married in 1858. Thus far I 
had slipped easily along without acquiring 
the least practical knowledge of domestic 
economy. Whatever else I had learned, I 
had not learned to cook or to sew, and I 
started, a girl of twenty, with the manage- 
ment of a home and the care of two little 
girls under five, with as little fear of failure 
and as much certainty of success as if I had 
been graduated from several schools of house- 
hold science. I had been so busy in my own 
way, and my mother in hers had been so 
efficient and capable, and I was really £o 


162 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


young, that the ordering, catering and pre- 
paring of meals had passed me by. No raw 
recruit was ever less fitted to step out of the 
awkward squad into the ranks of the thor- 
oughly drilled and disciplined army than I. 

Of course I made a few mistakes. I 
bought too much or too little, I had the 
usual difficulty in procuring adequate help, 
and my maid and I were not infrequently 
obliged to consult one another and admit our 
common ignorance of the way in which 
something should be done or left undone. 
Nevertheless, in a tolerably brief time I be- 
came a not unsuccessful housekeeper. 

A story is told of a painter to whom some 
one came with a tiresome question about his 
work. “ What do you mix your colours 
with ? ” said the amateur, interrupting the 
testy artist. 

“ With brains, Sir,” was the somewhat 
arrogant reply. 

I have always been of the opinion verified 
by my experience that any intelligent young 
woman who chooses to give attention to the 
work and has a sufficient motive to urge her 
on, may learn all the essentials underlying 
good housekeeping in six weeks. All that 
she needs is to mix her efforts with brains. 


THE FIRST GREAT GRIEF 


163 


The little daughters were a constant joy. 
I never cared to be called their stepmother, 
and so far as their loving adoption by my 
heart of hearts was concerned, there was no 
step. It would be difficult for me to-day to 
take care of two little children, to plan their 
clothing, superintend their play and their 
work and do the thousand little things that 
mothers do, but at twenty everything was 
easy and nothing hard. When in 1859 my 
child was born and the little girls had a 
brother, the cup of our happiness brimmed 
to the overflow. 


XIII 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 

P OLITICALLY, as we all know, now 
that the Civil War has receded into 
history, the states were in a condition 
of ferment during the decade that preceded 
1861. We are sufficiently remote from that 
era of bitterness and wrath to view it with 
judicial eyes, and we are now aware that an 
honest difference of opinion was at the basis 
of the stubbornly fought contest between 
North and South during four tempestuous 
years. The men of the South believed in the 
right of each state to its own autonomy, and 
its withdrawal at discretion from the united 
body of states. The men of the North held 
firmly to the conviction that while each state 
was at liberty to manage its own affairs, no 
state was free to break from the federated 
Union. At the core of the trouble was sla- 
very, a system that had become incorporated 
with the social and commercial interests of 
the South, and which the North regarded with 
horror and aversion. So extreme and diver- 
164 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 165 


gent were opinions on both sides that it was 
impossible for the people of either section to 
be entirely fair to their opposites. 

There was an aspect of slavery as it existed 
in our Southern states that was beautiful, 
tender and charming. The relations between 
master and servant were full of affection and 
confidence, and the kindly, simple-hearted 
people of the coloured race loved their white 
folk, did their bidding, had their own merry- 
makings and lived their lives without re- 
sponsibility and without protest, often from 
youth to age. 

There was another and sinister aspect, de- 
grading to the white and shameful to the 
black, an aspect of moral obliquity and de- 
generacy of which the proofs were evident 
enough in the mixing of races, and in the 
depraving of both. There must have been 
peril in any case to both races when, as it not 
infrequently happened, the children in the 
great house and the children in the cabins 
were of the same blood on the father’s side. 

In the rice and sugar plantations there was 
more hardship and greater cruelty than in 
Virginia and Kentucky, and it was the one 
thing dreaded beyond all else by the slaves 
in the more favoured states, that they might 


166 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


be sold and carried farther South. The slave 
markets where men and women were disposed 
of at auction to the highest bidder, as if they 
had been beasts of the field, were hideous in 
the eyes of Northern men. Equally, in the 
slaveholding South, the very mention of 
abolition was abominable. The plain truth 
was that slavery was a plague spot as danger- 
ous to the South as it was loathsome to the 
North. So long as it could be confined 
within certain geographical limits, it might 
be endured, but when commercial necessity 
brought into close proximity in the border 
states the interests of slaveholders and of 
free-soilers, there was no longer the possi- 
bility of peace. Slavery and freedom could 
not exist tranquilly together. 

When it became legally possible by enact- 
ment of Congress for a slave owner to pursue 
and recover his fleeing slave in a free state, 
the storm of feeling on both sides raged with 
vehemence and fury. By what was called 
the underground railroad, those who escaped 
from slavery were helped and passed on by 
friendly hands, from point to point, until 
they were safe in Canada under the Brit- 
ish flag. With inconceivable coolness and 
bravery some of these men and women, once 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 167 


safe and free, returned again to the South to 
assist into freedom friends and kin whom 
they had left behind. 

The newspapers of that day in Southern 
states often contained advertisements of run- 
aways with rewards for their return, and de- 
scriptions of this human property were not 
unlike similar descriptions of stray cattle. 
When good people were so widely apart in 
their conclusions that half of them main- 
tained that slavery was a divine institution 
while the other half declared it to be of the 
nature of hell, there was no common ground 
on which they could meet and mingle. 
There were conservative and fair-minded 
Southern men who perceived clearly that the 
so-called divine institution was the curse of 
the South, and they hoped for gradual 
emancipation and for the manumission of the 
slaves, and perhaps their colonization in 
Africa. These, however, were not prepared 
for a general emancipation, and they did not 
see how this could ever take place without 
absolute ruin to both white and black. 
There was, in short, a radical and irreconci- 
lable and quite honest difference of sentiment 
throughout the United States. 

Of the movements behind the scenes those 


168 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


in front of the stage are not in a position to 
judge. There is undoubtedly in this great 
country of ours an immense amount of dis- 
cussion and prearrangement of compromise 
here and concession there of which people in 
general know very little. In the ten years 
immediately preceding the storm of 1861 , 
life on the surface progressed to the mass 
with little interruption of the usual course. 

There is a story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 
of which I am reminded whenever I revert 
to the beginnings of the Civil War. The 
story is of an inn in the mountains. To its 
hospitable door travellers come at nightfall 
and by its blazing hearth they sit in good 
fellowship telling stories and singing songs. 
Odd noises are heard in the mountains, and 
there is an ominous rising of the wind, but 
nobody is disturbed and nobody pays atten- 
tion, for the menace of the mountain and the 
murmur of the winds have been heard so 
often that they have grown familiar and 
awaken no anxiety. Yet, fast following on 
an evening of pleasure by the fireside comes a 
terrific landslide, blotting out the inn and 
swallowing up its inhabitants. 

Our landslide precipitated itself upon us in 
the fullness of time, and though it did not blot 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 169 


out any part of our country, it left ruin and 
devastation everywhere. North and South 
it decimated the ranks of our young men ; 
it everywhere made widows and orphans and 
left in its wake broken hearts and shattered 
homes. Before that great landslide there 
were mutterings and menaces, and there were 
those who heard them and knew what they 
meant. Preparations went on for warfare, of- 
fensive and defensive, long before war was 
actually declared, and the sewing of the seed 
that was to ripen in red harvesting went 
steadily on. By the majority little was sus- 
pected and nothing feared. So astute and 
shrewd an observer, so statesmanlike a ge- 
nius as Henry Ward Beecher, in a magnifi- 
cent sermon in Plymouth Church, affirmed 
in my hearing that there was no cause for 
alarm, that the talk we heard of possible 
secession was the merest vapouring, and that 
in the end nothing would happen. As the 
crowded congregation listened spellbound to 
the great preacher, and his voice in its un- 
paralleled music thrilled every ear, there was 
no dissent in the minds of those who listened 
from the dictum of the pulpit. That the 
threats we heard would ever culminate in an 
assault upon the flag, few of us believed. Mr. 


170 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Beecher only voiced the conclusion of the 
people at large when he declared that there 
would be no direct act of revolt against the 
permanence of the Union, although the dis- 
affected were not slow in agitating the public. 

We have come to canonize Abraham 
Lincoln as the noblest of Americans, as al- 
most the finest of our heroes and leaders, 
but in the days that preceded his first elec- 
tion he was abused as a mountebank and 
language was exhausted to furnish a suffi- 
cient vocabulary in which to express the 
contempt and malice of his political op- 
ponents. Where there was no malice and 
perhaps no contempt, there was an equal dis- 
like of and turning from the thought of 
Abraham Lincoln in the presidential chair. 

I was for some weeks of the summer previ- 
ous to Lincoln's first election a guest in a 
Presbyterian manse in New Jersey. The 
minister was a man of great dignity and of 
the highest breeding. He was of the old 
school of courteous gentlemen, a native of 
South Carolina and a graduate of Princeton. 
He could not so much as bear to mention 
Lincoln's name, and when I accompanied 
him, as it was often my privilege to do, on 
long drives over the hills, to visit outlying 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 171 


parishioners, he gave me much information 
about the state of the country, the infamy 
of Northern politicians and the destruction 
that would come to us were Lincoln elected. 

A dear old lady said one day, with up- 
lifted hands, “ No one can imagine that we’ll 
ever have a battle ! ” Yet she was to see a 
son and a grandson marching off to encounter 
the risks of many an engagement. 

Whittier in ringing verse over and over 
spoke for the North in the days before the 
war. In a lyric entitled “ Massachusetts to 
Virginia/’ he tersely put the situation and 
the sentiment as men felt and spoke and 
acted almost up to the day that the war began. 

“We hear thy threats, Virginia ! thy stormy words 
and high 

Swell harshly on the Southern winds which melt 
along our sky ; 

Yet, not one brown, hard hand foregoes its 
honest labour here, 

No hewer of our mountain oaks suspends his axe 
in fear. 

“Wild are the waves which lash the reefs along 
St. George’s bank ; 

Cold on the shores of Labrador the fog lies white 
and dank ; 

Through storm, and wave, and blinding mist, 
stout are the hearts which man 

The fishing-smacks of Marblehead, the sea-boats 
of Cape Ann. 


172 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


u The cold north light and starry sun glare on their 
icy forms, 

Bent grimly o’er their straining lines or wrest- 
ling with the storms j 

Free as the winds they drive before, rough as the 
waves they roam, 

They laugh to scorn the slaver’s threat against 
their rocky home. 

“ What means the Old Dominion ? Hath she for- 
got the day 

When o’er her conquered valleys swept the 
Briton’s steel array? 

How side by side, with sons of hers, the Massa- 
chusetts men 

Encountered Tarleton’s charge of fire, and stout 
Cornwallis, then ? 

“ Forgets she how the Bay State, in answer to the 
call 

Of her old House of Burgesses, spoke out from 
Faneuil Hall ? 

When, echoing back her Henry’s cry, came 
pulsing on each breath 

Of Northern winds the thrilling sounds of 
1 Liberty or Death ! ’ ” 

In the whole round of human affairs little 
is so fatal to peace as misunderstanding. 
When this is coloured by suspicion and bol- 
stered by prejudice it forms an element as de- 
structive as dynamite. South and North were 
involved in misunderstanding, the more to 
be feared that it could not but result in a 
fraternal feud. No quarrels are so deadly 
as those in which members of the same 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 173 


family are arrayed against one another. 
In the border states it was peculiarly evident 
that the feud was to invade and embroil 
households and families. I knew more than 
one home in which during that time of ex- 
citement mothers and daughters were in 
antagonism, and brothers were at enmity. 
Yet to the outside and indifferent spectator 
things were smooth superficially. Marriage 
bells rang as merrily as ever, children played 
as happily, the schools and universities were 
full of the youth of the country, and buying 
and selling went on in the market-place. 
There might be vast preparations going on, 
ammunition piling up and men drilling in 
secret, but the commonplace world fared on 
its commonplace way, and was none the 
wiser. 

The year after my marriage witnessed the 
episode of John Brown’s futile attempt at 
Harper’s Ferry ; brave old fanatic that he 
was, it was his hand that all unwittingly let 
loose the dogs of war. 

A few weeks ago I read again the life of 
that sincere, mistaken old enthusiast, and I 
lived over again in memory the days of his 
trial and the day of his execution. To me 
he was a martyr. To the Southern kins- 


174 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


woman who was spending that year in my 
home, he was a highway robber and a ruffian, 
and we could not talk of him, so conflicting 
were our views. 

Only a little while, so swiftly time flies, 
and in Maryland and Virginia I saw the 
gleam of the camp-fires and heard the men 
singing as they sang throughout the war : 

“ John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave, 
His soul is marching on.” 

Julia Ward Howe, inspired by the sight 
of the men in army blue and by the sound 
of the bugle call and drum beat in Washing- 
ton, wrote her immortal “ Battle Hymn of 
the Republic.” Long may we sing it to the 
same tune that the soldiers sang. Written 
for one war, it lives forever a battle hymn of 
life with its superb refrain : 

“He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall 
never call retreat, 

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His 
judgment seat, 

O be swift my soul to answer Him, 

Be jubilant my feet, 

For God is marching on.” 

As the clouds grew blacker and the atmos- 
phere became charged with passion, press 


HINTS OF THE COMING STORM 175 


and pulpit took up the dominant note of 
agitation and resentment. I had relatives 
and dear friends in the South, and was there- 
fore by way of hearing how they felt and 
talked there. In the North, at first slowly, 
and by degrees with greater momentum, the 
feeling of doubt and indifference changed to 
one of positive determination and indignant 
resolve. Day by day the morning news- 
papers brought to our breakfast tables sug- 
gestions of what was in the air. Inflamma- 
tory speeches were made and threats were 
loudly expressed against Mr. Lincoln, hun- 
dreds of people predicting that he would 
be assassinated before his inauguration. A 
most conservative ministerial friend of mine 
preached one Sunday morning an eloquent 
sermon on the duty of the hour from the 
text, “ He that hath no sword, let him sell 
his garment and buy one.” Occasionally 
the pulpit displayed unfairness in its adapta- 
tion of texts to sermons, as when the Rev. T. 
DeWitt Talmage, never hampered by con- 
vention, took for his key-note a clause from 
a verse and used it for his dramatic purpose. 
His text was “ The arms of the South shall 
not withstand,” but looked at in its original 
connection, it had no reference to any polit- 


176 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ical situation. The sermon, however, was 
prophetic and convincing. 

One by one the days slipped away, the 
weeks wore into months and the clock of 
Time struck the hour that was the begin- 
ning of our transformation. Whittier, bard 
and seer, wrote what all hearts felt, in an- 
other of his war lyrics : 

“If, for the age to come, this hour 
Of trial hath vicarious power, 

And, blest by Thee, our present pain 
Be Liberty’s eternal gain, 

Thy will be done. 

“ Strike, Thou the Master, we Thy keys, 

The anthem of the destinies ! 

The minor of Thy loftier strain, 

Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain, 

Thy will be done.” 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, forseeing what 
the end must be in a conflict evoked by in- 
justice, greed and mistaken zeal, and justi- 
fied by no necessity, ended a poem concern- 
ing North and South with the lines : 

“God help them if the tempest swing 
The pine against the palm.” 


XIV 

IN WAR DAYS 

N OT so very long ago, we in America 
went through the little flurry of a 
brief war with Spain. With its 
causes and results this chronicle has nothing 
to do, except to say that its finest fruit was 
obtained neither in Cuba nor the Philip- 
pines, but in the opportunity it afforded for 
the trampling out of old enmities and the 
reunion of old soldiers under the flag of the 
nation. The men who in the Civil War 
confronted one another as foes fought side 
by side as friends in this last war. Time 
marches at a double-quick pace. On the 
record of history a half century counts for 
little, and it is not yet a half century since 
the blue and the gray fought in the wilder- 
ness at Vicksburg, at Gettysburg, in the 
Shenandoah Valley, on Lookout Mountain 
and in many another field. 

When the war began it is noteworthy that 
the men and women of the South entered 
upon it in a fervour of patriotism and with a 
177 


178 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


reckless enthusiasm that stand out in bril- 
liant contrast against the matchless sadness 
of their lost cause. The older and wiser men 
of the seceding states had their fears and 
regrets, but they were loyal rather to their 
state than their country. The younger men 
were untrammelled by the slightest thought 
that they might be mistaken, and they went 
into the war in precisely the arrogant spirit 
of the cavaliers who in the days of Charles 
the First confronted Cromwell's Roundheads. 
They anticipated little trouble. Theirs was 
the dash and elan of a superior race accustomed 
to rule an inferior. For tradespeople, day- 
labourers, counter-jumpers, they cherished 
an immense disdain. They did not hesitate 
to declare that theirs would be an easy vic- 
tory, and that the prosaic people of the 
North, who presumed to oppose them, would 
have long opportunity and sorrowful reason 
to bewail their temerity. Massachusetts, New 
York, Rhode Island, Ohio were alike sur- 
veyed with contempt by the brave young 
fellows who kissed their sweethearts or wives 
good-bye and rushed to the war as to a 
summer holiday. 

The women, needless to say, were by far 
more bitter than the men. I say only less 


IN WAR DAYS 


179 


than the truth when I speak of Southern 
matrons and Southern maidens as the loveli- 
est, most winsome and most charming women 
in the wide world. Whether they live to se- 
rene old age or wear the rosebud bloom of earli- 
est youth, they are exquisite in manner, digni- 
fied in bearing, austere in virtue, and sweet 
to the core. They are always feminine. The 
mannish woman has never been a Southern 
product. Now when a feminine creature, 
from a lioness to a hen, stands at bay, it is as 
well to beware of her. Southern women in 
war days were thoroughly convinced that 
their cause was just. They were unshaken 
in their creed that the Northern foe was a 
ruthless invader worthy of no quarter. They 
thought that God was on their side. There 
was not a sacrifice from which they shrank, 
nor a hardship that they did not accept 
without complaint. When poverty of the 
grimmest, and pain of the sorest, and disap- 
pointment of the direst became their portion, 
they met each successive onslaught of ca- 
lamity with magnificent courage and heroic 
pride. From first to last the women of the 
South were brave, consistent and malignant. 
They were good haters. Left in many cases 
alone on their plantations, often without a 


180 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


white man to guard them, their coloured 
people stood by them loyally. None of the 
difficulties and none of the crimes that natu- 
rally followed the sudden enfranchisement 
of an enslaved people were dreamed of dur- 
ing the war. Even after their emancipation 
numbers of the coloured people, not yet 
knowing what to do with freedom, stayed 
with and worked for their former masters 
and mistresses. 

The mistress of a plantation before the 
war was nurse, mother, caretaker, com- 
mander-in-chief, and it may be added, serv- 
ant-in-chief as well, carrying the burden of 
administration and looking after the conduct 
and comfort of her several families of negroes. 
White children were nursed by black mam- 
mys, white and black children played to- 
gether and friendship was firmly cemented 
between them though the white were to be 
the rulers and the black the dependents. 
All the young and strong men of the South 
went into the war during its terrible four 
years. None were left at home, but the 
very old, the crippled and the infirm. Boys 
in their teens were pressed into the service, 
whole classes left college at once in a body, 
and enlisted. 


IN WAR DAYS 


181 


A gallant young nephew of mine, in his 
seventeenth year, joined Moseby’s command 
and fought through the war. During its 
progress he was taken prisoner and confined 
in the Old Capitol prison in Washington. 
From its grim portals he contrived to send a 
letter to me, telling of his misfortune and 
asking if I could not manage to send him 
relief. I was the wife of an officer in the 
Union Army, and the boy was a captured 
rebel. Nevertheless, as blood is thicker than 
water, I speedily sent him a sum of money 
that was ample enough to secure for him 
many comforts. No great interval elapsed 
before I received a letter conveyed in some 
way through the lines, telling me that John 
through my timely assistance had made his 
escape, and was again in the field with his 
old command. 

Prices, as every one knows, mounted sky- 
ward during the war. We gave dollars for the 
purchase of goods for which we had hitherto 
given cents. As for our dress, we of the 
North were arrayed as we had always been, 
in poplin or silk, or cotton, as we chose, 
though cotton in those days was dearer than 
silk. Hoops came in and the style of dress 
was clumsy and absurd. No absurdity of 


182 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


dress can do much to eclipse a pretty woman, 
and so we did not look badly to our con- 
temporaries, though in the cartes-de-visite f 
treasured in ancient photograph albums, we 
are figures of fun. The management of 
hoop skirts was a difficult art. They were 
prone to tip in directions inconvenient to the 
wearer, and the woman within them looked 
like a walking pyramid. 

In the South, women were reduced to every 
device of invention and every resort of home- 
made contrivance to make their wardrobes 
equal to their needs when their ports were 
blockaded and they were unable to hold com- 
munication with the outside world. Women 
who had never been denied a luxury, who 
had worn purple and fine linen, and been 
treated as the lilies of the field that neither 
toil nor spin, wore their old clothes dyed, 
darned and otherwise rejuvenated, with a 
grace that would not have shamed the old 
noblesse of France. What to them were the 
trivial considerations of fashion when their 
beloved cause was wavering, when their sick 
and wounded were crowding the hospitals, 
and when slowly, yet inevitably, the strength 
of the North was triumphing over their 
weakness ? 


IN WAR DAYS 


183 


A woman of Mississippi said to me that 
she could never tell how striking and terrible 
was the contrast when their own soldiers, 
ragged and emaciated, footsore and ill, were 
seen by her who loved them, one day when 
the Northern soldiers under Grant came 
pouring in, a procession that seemed endless. 
“ There were so many of them/’ she said, 
“ they were well fed, they were well clothed, 
they were as fresh as if they had just gone 
forth, and our poor fellows were so pale and 
thin and worn out.” 

The women of the border states knew a 
great deal about the war in picturesque per- 
sonal experience. Undoubtedly they had 
much to complain of, but as General Sherman 
said, “ War is cruel, and you cannot refine it.” 

Long after the Civil War was over I drove 
with friends through the beautiful Valley of 
the Shenandoah, when the golden harvest of 
the wheat was falling before the scythe. The 
Shenandoah is a blue ribbon of a river with 
twists and loops through its folding valley. 
The valley was the scene of hotly con- 
tested encounters, and during that June 
drive I was entertained in fine old houses 
that had successively been occupied by 
Federal and Confederate soldiers. My lovely 


184 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


hostess in one house showed me a devastated 
library with remnants of priceless editions, 
and a desecrated drawing-room where, with 
rude vandalism, mirrors had been smashed 
and carved mantels ruined. This, she told 
me, had been the work of Pennsylvania 
Volunteers. In this particular house succes- 
sive troops of both armies had found shelter, 
one arriving swiftly on the heels of the other, 
surprises and skirmishes taking place in the 
door-yard. This lady had owned a beauti- 
ful blooded pony, the pride of her heart. 
Feeling certain that the Yankee soldiers in 
one of their raids would deprive her of it, 
and having already lost other valuable 
horses that had been seized by the army, she 
hid her pet in the cellar, going there to feed 
him and doing her utmost to conceal the fact 
of his existence from the enemy established 
at one time beneath her roof. She was 
startled one morning by a question from the 

commanding officer. “ Mrs. , why are 

you keeping a horse in the cellar ? He may 
go blind. You would much better keep him 
in the stable.” Ingenuously telling him 
why she was hiding her pony, he begged her 
to dismiss her fears, and wrote an order for 
her to show others of our army who might 


IN WAR DAYS 


185 


subsequently take possession of her home. 
This order protected her horse from seizure, 
and he lived to a good old age. 

Love affairs of a romantic nature were not 
uncommon in war days. Once, for example, 
after a hard day’s march, a group of men 
around the camp-fire were talking of home 
and of the dear ones left behind. Said one 
man to another, “ When next we get any 
mail I will show you a letter from the next 
to the dearest girl in the world, a cousin who 
is almost like a sister to me.” Time passed 
and the incident and promise were forgotten, 
when, lo ! one evening mail arrived, and the 
reading of letters from home blotted out the 
hardships of the day and the dread of the 
morrow. From one of the letters fell a little 
photograph. The young lieutenant picked it 
up to restore to its owner, asking if he might 
look at it. “ Of course you may,” was the 
answer. “ It is the picture of my Cousin 
Sarah, the girl I told you of a month ago. I 
then said she was next to the dearest girl in 
the world.” 

A correspondence was begun, and this, too, 
was not unprecedented in those days, between 
the girl at home and her cousin’s friend in 
the army. She and her girl chum had 


186 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


spoken and thought a great deal about the 
army, for the chum was engaged to Sarah’s 
cousin and was going to him to be married, 
since he could not go to her. After a brief 
correspondence, Cousin Sarah in her turn an- 
nounced her engagement to the lieutenant 
who had taken her heart by storm, and, be- 
fore the war ended, they were married. They 
met only once previous to their wedding day. 
Leaves of absence were not easily obtained 
in that strenuous time, but the lieutenant 
gained a short furlough when he presented 
himself in person to Sarah and her fam- 
ily. The young girl found her ideal ful- 
filled, and the soldier’s plea was granted 
by her father and mother. I knew them 
intimately in the years of peace. Both 
are gone, and I am therefore able to speak 
of them candidly. The marriage of ro- 
mance was not altogether a happy one, 
for the two stepped from a different back- 
ground, and their training for life had 
been diverse. Yet both were conscientious 
and faithful. Their tastes in literature 
were congenial and their creed to which 
they clung loyally was the same. They 
had a beautiful home and were given to 
hospitality, and if there was a jarring 


IN WAR DAYS 


187 


chord, it was due to the fact that Cousin 
Sarah demanded more sentiment and poetry 
than her practical husband could give. If 
the story has a moral, it is that in marriage 
it is well not to trust exclusively an acquaint- 
ance ripened only in letters. 

I was often the confidante of men away 
from home who thought and talked about 
the girls to whom they were betrothed. 
One brave youth, not far beyond his early 
twenties, was never weary of descanting on 
the perfections of his distant Julia. “ If 
Julia and I are married,” he would say, 
“ we will do this or the other thing, if Julia 
and I are ever wife and husband, we will 
show other people that plain republicans can 
have as good a time as a king and a queen,” 
and so on, laughing as he chatted away in 
the foolishly happy way of a young man in 
love. “ Why do you always say * if ’ ? ” I in- 
quired. “ Why not say when ? ” 

“ Oh,” he replied, “ I cannot presume to 
say when, the girl being Julia. She is as 
coy as a bird on a bough, and here I am in 
the army, and there is she at home with a 
dozen fellows paying court to her.” 

“ Yes, but she is your promised wife,” I 
said. “ Surely you trust her word and be- 


188 


FKOM MY YOUTH UP 


lieve that her yes means really yes, and not 
perhaps.” 

44 Well,” he summed up the matter, 
“ when Julia and I are walking up the aisle 
together and the parson is waiting and the 
wedding march is being played I shall be- 
lieve in my good fortune, and not till then.” 
Without irreverence, it may be said, that 
this young lover was like Christians who 
lack assurance. His Julia was devotedly at- 
tached to him, and the day came when they 
walked up the aisle together and the words 
were pronounced that made them one for 
life. They had three beautiful years, only 
three. At the end of that period a jealous 
rival who had been in the Confederate Army 
while my friend was in the Union Army, a 
man from the same county and a graduate 
of the same school, rode up to the door one 
evening in the dusk, accompanied by several 
friends. He dismounted from his horse, 
which one of the friends held. They stood 
perfectly still, a little in the shadow. The 
wife was ill in a room up-stairs, and the hus- 
band was sitting by her side. Julia's 
coloured Mammy who had been with her all 
her life, opened the door and replied that 
her master was in, summoning him to meet 


IN WAR DAYS 


189 


a stranger. He came down-stairs to find a 
revolver pointed at his breast. A single 
word and with fatal aim, the assassin fired, 
' and rode away. My friend lived only long 
enough to reach his wife's bedside where he 
fell dead. I have never forgotten his tragic 
fate, his blithe young face, his ready laugh 
and his gay wit. He had been a good sol- 
dier and had gone unscathed through many 
battles, to die by the hand of a murderer 
who revenged himself thus, because he, too, 
had been a suitor for a fair girl's hand, and 
had been refused. 

In the border states, in those days, there 
was plenty of room for elemental passion and 
weird vindictiveness. 

How many things return to one who looks 
back over forty years ! The tragic and the 
comic, the joyful and the sorrowful often 
touch one another. I remember a rough 
illiterate soldier to whom I often spoke in 
the days when he was recovering from a 
wound in the hospital. He was a good deal 
my senior, but when he was fit for duty 
again he came one day to pay his respects 
and to bring me a present. It proved to be 
a useful, though not ornamental plated 
castor, holding four bottles for oil, vinegar, 


190 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


etc. “ You have been a mother to me,” he 
said, “ and I fancied you might like this.” 

Another lad in army blue, a brave, sol- 
dierly fellow, told me that he had never 
learned either to read or write. It was 
strange, for he was not lacking in intelli- 
gence, and evidently had a good mind. 
“ You must learn,” I said, “ and you would 
better begin to-day.” We strenuously at- 
tempted the work, he as pupil and I as 
teacher, and before many weeks he wrote a 
good hand and read remarkably well. I 
lost sight of him in the comings and goings 
of enlisted men, and had indeed forgotten 
him when, one day in walking in Grand 
Street, New York, my progress was sud- 
denly arrested by a big uniformed police- 
man who appeared to fill up the street. 
“ Why, you do not know me,” he said. 
“ And here I am on the force, and I owe it 
all to you.” He was my soldier boy, and he 
lived a useful and honoured life, becoming a 
police captain and dying, alas, in the merid- 
ian of his years. 

I recall, too, a day spent in Washington 
in the second year of the war. I was looking 
for a wounded man. A friend in the West 
had written urging me to find and minister 


IN WAR DAYS 


191 


to him, if I could. I went from one hos- 
pital to another, through ward after ward, 
finding at last the object of my search. 
Such quests were not always successful. 
When they were the joy of sending good 
news home paid for no end of trouble. 


XV 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR, AND THE 
DEATH OF LINCOLN 

B etween April 14, i86i, when 

Abraham Lincoln issued his first call 
for volunteers and April 9, 1865, when 
Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, 
Virginia, surrendered his sword to Ulysses 
S. Grant, lay four terrible years. No one 
who lived in those days of strife can forget 
them. We did not then call the conflict, as 
we call it now, the Civil War, although such 
in reality it was. In the South they termed 
us Yankees, a name always linked with re- 
proach, invaders and usurpers. 

A young girl, the daughter of a refined 
and highly cultivated family, told me that 
when she heard that Yankee soldiers were to 
march into Norfolk she hid herself for hours 
in the darkest corner of the attic. Finally, 
as strains of military music filled the air, 
curiosity triumphed over fear and she fur- 
tively peeked from the window. She said, 
192 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


193 


“ I expected to see a procession of devils 
with horns and hoofs, and I could scarcely 
believe my eyes when the men, in their blue 
uniforms, came by looking like other men. 
I hated the sight of those uniforms, but there 
was nothing I could do to show how much 
I detested the soldiers except to make faces 
at them behind the pane.” 

This "girl was a lady in manner and had 
received a good education. There were 
gentlewomen not a few in those tempestuous 
days who did not hesitate to show their aver- 
sion to Northern soldiers in less childish 
fashion than that of making faces. South- 
ern women would draw their clothing away 
as with veiled countenances they trod the 
same streets with Union soldiers. Occa- 
sionally a woman would so far forget herself 
as audibly to call approbrious names when 
she passed the blue-coated ranks. I do not 
think that women of the highest social rank 
or of real refinement ever stooped to the dis- 
grace of spitting at the soldiers whom they 
hated. This act of contumely was left to the 
baser born and more ignorant of their num- 
ber. It must also be acknowledged to the 
credit of womanly hearts and of Christian 
sentiment that kind hands often ministered 


194 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


to wounded Northern soldiers as well as to 
those who wore the gray. 

The horrors that surrounded Northern 
prisoners of war at Libby and Andersonville 
baffle language to describe. The conditions 
of Southern military prisons during the Civil 
War were revolting. Yet the Confederate 
authorities were almost powerless to remedy 
the situation. Supplies were cut off, they 
were confronting starvation themselves, they 
could not feed their own people and they 
could not well and properly care for their 
own wounded and sick. They naturally felt 
little tenderness for Northern prisoners, but 
they probably did what they could, which 
was very little, to make their confinement 
bearable. I have seen thousands of North- 
ern soldiers returning as exchange prisoners 
on parole, from the military jails where they 
had been awaiting death or release. They 
were gaunt spectres of humanity, emaciated 
to skin and bone, young men tottering as if 
they were old, and it is less than the truth 
to say that those who died on the field were 
often more fortunate than their comrades 
who were taken prisoners, for disease some- 
times laid its hand on the latter with a 
clutch that could not be loosened, These 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


195 


men were exchanged for an equal number of 
Southern prisoners of war sent back to their 
commands. 

Our Northern system in the military 
prisons was not above criticism. We, too, 
inflicted unnecessary hardships on prisoners, 
for which we had reason to blush, but our 
conditions were far better and we were not 
ourselves suffering from utterly depleted 
resources and an exhausted commissariat. 

Through the length and breadth of the 
North the soldiers of the Confederacy were 
called rebels. A stubborn determination 
filled both Federals and Confederates, and 
on neither side was there a thought of com- 
promise or stopping until the bitter end. 
The sentiment, as the Northern army felt 
it, was ^tersely expressed in a quatrain that 
comes into memory as I write. 

u We have heard the rebel yell, 

We have heard the Union shout, 

We know the matter very well, 

And we mean to fight it out.” 

Songs and music kindled the ardour of the 
blue and the gray. We had nothing sweeter 
and more inspiring than “ Dixie ” and 
u Maryland, My Maryland,” that the South- 


196 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ern boys sang around their camp-fires, and 
which the Southern girls, left desolate at 
home, sang with white lips and dauntless 
hearts. We had our “ Rally Round the 
Flag, Boys,” “ Coming, Father Abraham,” 
and “ Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are 
Marching.” 

I am not ashamed to confess that when I 
hear these old strains played on a hand- 
organ by a wandering street musician I am 
more moved than by the finest airs on the 
operatic stage. The rollicking, lilting tunes 
of the war time carry me back to those days 
of uncertainty, anxiety and excitement, days 
when life moved to the note of the bugle 
and the beat of the drum, and when hour by 
hour we waited in suspense, not knowing 
what the next instant might mean to us. 

The battles of the Civil War were deadly, 
and long lists of killed and wounded and 
mournful lists of missing filled the newspa- 
pers after every encounter. The childish 
idea of battles in array, standing in full 
view each of the other, vaguely lingers in the 
mind of many who are grown to maturity, 
and it is not until we have walked over 
battle-fields and have seen how men have 
fought under cover of groves and bits of 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


197 


woodland and from the shelter of fences and 
barns, fighting all day long over ploughed 
land, on mountain top or hill crest, that we 
get an idea of real warfare. 

At Petersburg, Virginia, there were two 
forts that had been gallantly held by the 
Confederates and fiercely striven for by their 
opponents. Walking over the ground near 
those fortifications a few days after the close 
of the war, my near-sighted eyes caught the 
glint of something bright on the ground. 
Stooping to pick it up, supposing it to be a 
bit of metal, my hand closed over a lock of 
bright golden hair. Just beneath that crust 
of earth lay the form of a soldier as he had 
fallen, his comrades having given him 
burial so scant that the earth had not wholly 
covered the golden head. To that body and 
others was given Christian burial. One of 
the most pathetic sights in this country to 
me is that of small white tombstones in 
National Cemeteries on which is the inscrip- 
tion “ Unknown.” Somewhere in the long 
ago, hearts ached, tears fell and homes 
grieved for the loss of those unidentified sol- 
diers. 

In Savannah, Georgia, where the gray 
moss waves from the trees as if it were 


198 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


silently bewailing the dead, there is an im- 
pressive monument erected over the Confed- 
erate soldiers buried there. It bears the 
touching inscription, “ Come from the four 
winds, O breath, and breathe upon these 
slain that they may live.” When annually 
May brings to most states of the Union a 
Memorial Day, flowers are impartially dis- 
tributed over the graves of those who poured 
their blood in crimson sacrifice in those 
thrilling years. 

Not all the states combine to keep Decora- 
tion Day on the 30th of May, several of 
the Southern States having a day of their 
own ; but throughout most of the Union the 
nation remembers its sons who fell in the 
Civil War, garlands their graves and has 
love and tears alike for blue and gray. 
There is no bitterness in our thought now, 
and the children born in this day, by the 
time they have reached their majority, may 
look upon the period, so pregnant with great 
issues and so interesting to its survivors, as a 
mere episode. Already Decoration Day has 
lost much of its original sad solemnity and 
gentle significance, and is welcomed as a 
holiday by children at school and weary 
business people. The Grand Army of the 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


199 


Republic is thinned year by year by the 
death of the veterans, and one of these days 
there will be somewhere a lonely man who 
will possess the sombre dignity of the last 
soldier who fought under Grant. 

In the closing days of the war I happened 
to be staying in Baltimore, a typical border 
city. Maryland never left the Union, but 
the hearts of many of her citizens were 
pledged to the Southern cause, and many of 
its beautiful women pinned a secession flag 
to their corsage all through the war. On the 
direct route to Washington, it was there 
that the first soldiers of the Union fell, 
soldiers of the Massachusetts Sixth, on their 
way to the Capital, and Governor Andrew 
sent from Boston his pathetic telegram, 
“ Send tenderly home the bodies of our 
Massachusetts dead.” 

In Baltimore, on the evening of the 9th of 
April, 1865, the entire population was on 
the street. The crowds surged to and fro 
and the wildest joy prevailed. Strangers 
embraced one another, bands played, groups 
broke out into cheers and songs, and one 
triumphant thought transcended all else. 
The war was over, we were to be at peace, 
Lee had surrendered ! To the Unionists the 


200 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


tidings seemed too good to be true ; the Con- 
federates in heart heard them like a death 
knell. The most marked contrast was seen 
in the residential quarters of the town where 
whole houses were illuminated, blazing with 
light from attic to basement and waving with 
flags, while a door or two away a house would 
stand wrapped in midnight gloom, not the 
glimmer of a candle perceptible, in an effect 
of profoundest melancholy. 

The contagion of enthusiasm, the intense 
relief that the war was over and that we were 
to have peace made the night memorable. 
Nobody thought of going to bed. Groups 
broke out into spontaneous song and shout, 
and those who lamented drifted back into 
the shadows, a turbulent minority indeed, 
but not one to be dreaded. Little could any 
one forecast in that flood-tide of gladness the 
sorrow that was soon to eclipse our joy. 

Women wore mourning for the Con- 
federacy, although they had lost neither 
kinsman nor friend. To those who had 
hoped for the success of the South its failure 
involved heart-break. Long after the war 
was past and the scenes of this night had 
receded into history, I one day met a brilliant 
Southern woman whose garb indicated woe 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


201 


and whose face bore signs of tears. Inquir- 
ing what occasioned her sadness I was told 
that she always wore mourning for the lost 
cause, on the 9th of April. 

A Southern friend came in one day flushed 
and hurried, and explained that she was per- 
fectly worn out because she had been dodging 
the United States flag all day. This also was 
when the war was over, and when on a 
patriotic anniversary the streets were gay 
with bunting. 

Of my dear ones who were with me on 
that April evening, 1865, and of the group of 
friends who shared the fullness of that victori- 
ous hour, not one remains. It is a far cry 
from 1865 to 1909. The years of the Civil 
War are in memory as the pageant of a dream, 
and the large majority of those who belonged 
to my life then have passed to that shore 
where “ beyond these voices there is peace.” 

We were destined very soon to undergo 
the shock of Lincoln’s assassination. On 
the 10th of April with my husband and 
several friends I started for Richmond, the 
fallen Capital of the Confederacy. Rich- 
mond is beautiful for situation, but ruin and 
disaster and the still smoking embers of a 
wasting conflagration made it unspeakably 


202 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


sad as I then saw it. On the 15th of April 
when the news of Lincoln’s death at the 
hands of John Wilkes Booth, was flashed 
over the land, we who had been so joyous 
were crushed beneath a weight of woe. The 
tragedy enveloped us in a pall of blackness, 
and every loyal household grieved as for its 
own. Patient and wise and steadfast, the 
great Captain had piloted the Ship of State 
through its stormiest voyage, and now he 
lay done to death on its deck. We are far 
enough from that time of trouble to realize 
that it was God’s kindest angel who snatched 
Abraham Lincoln away in the hour of su- 
preme success, but we could not feel that 
when the loss was recent, nor admit it for 
long thereafter. 

Walt Whitman’s superb poem, the finest 
he ever wrote, and worth pages of his other 
verse, will live as long as Lincoln’s hallowed 
memory. 

O CAPTAIN ! MY CAPTAIN ! 

c 1 O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 

The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we 
sought is won, 

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all 
exulting, 

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim 
and daring $ 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


203 


But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 

O the bleeding drops of red, 
Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 


“ O Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 

Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the 
bugle trills, 

For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths — for you 
the shores a-crowding 

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager 
faces turning ; 

Here, Captain ! dear father ! 

This arm beneath your head ! 

It is some dream that on the deck 
You’ve fallen cold and dead. 


“ My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and 
still, 

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse 
nor will, 

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage 
closed and done, 

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with 
object won ; 

Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells ! 

But I, with mournful tread, 

Walk the deck my Captain lies, 

Fallen cold and dead.” 

John Wilkes Booth, a young actor said to 
be gifted, a brother of the incomparable 
Edwin Booth, partially represented the mad- 
dened spirit of the South at that crucial 
moment. There may have been thousands 
of young lunatics who felt as he did and 


204 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


who gloried in his foolhardy act of murder. 
Those who knew him best declared that 
there was in him much that was lovable, 
and it may easily be that he felt himself an 
avenger as he levelled his revolver and 
shouted “ Sic semper tyrannus.” Never was 
assassination more entirely without excuse, 
never went martyr more blamelessly to the 
stake. It is fair to say that the best men of 
the South deeply deplored the insane act of 
John Wilkes Booth. 

In an exquisite monograph entitled “ Why 
We Love Lincoln ” James Creelman sympa- 
thetically describes the death scene. “ After 
he was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's 
Theatre on April 14, 1865, Lincoln never 
spoke again. He had seen the stars and 
stripes raised in Richmond. He had seen 
the end of human slavery on the American 
continent. The nation was one again. But 
he was to speak no death-message. It was 
all in that last great speech : ‘ With malice 

towards none ; with charity for all.' 

“ For hours they stood about him as he lay 
moaning or struggling for breath, his wife, 
his cabinet officers, his pastor, secretary and 
doctors. At daybreak the troubled look 
vanished from his face. There was absolute 


THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 


205 


stillness, followed by a trembling prayer by 
the pastor. 

“ * Now he belongs to the ages/ said the 
deep voice of Secretary Stanton.” 

I can best complete this chapter by quot- 
ing the noble conclusion of Abraham 
Lincoln’s last message to the American 
people, a message so sublime that it gains 
lustre as time rolls on. 

“ Fondly do we hope — fervently do we 
pray — that this mighty scourge of war may 
speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it 
continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of 
unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until 
every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall 
be paid by another drawn with the sword, 
as was said three thousand years ago, so still 
it must be said, ‘ The judgments of the Lord 
are true and righteous altogether.’ 

“ With malice towards none ; with charity 
for all ; with firmness in the right, let us 
strive on to finish the work we are in ; to 
bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him 
who shall have borne the battle, and for his 
widow, and his orphan — to do all which may 
achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace 
among ourselves, and with all nations.” 


XVI 


A SOUTHERN TOWN IN THE RECONSTRUC- 
TION PERIOD 

R EVERTING to the years immediately 
after the war when we pitched our 
tent, so to speak, in Norfolk, Vir- 
ginia, and took up our abode there as a 
family, I find myself living in a dream of 
fair women and brave men. I hear again 
the thrilling sweetness of the mocking-bird, 
I see the glory of the crepe myrtle trees, 
each a magnificent bouquet of roseate bloom, 
I walk through gardens hedged with box 
and running over with flowers, I stoop to 
gather white violets, I watch the ships 
floating over the river and once again I 
am thralled by the melody of the South. 
How ineffaceable is its charm ! How the 
beauty of it tugs at the heart, how one 
wakens to think of it in the night, and 
yearns for it in the morning ! I who have 
never lost my love for the South, though I 
lived there less than ten years, understand 
its hold on those who are its native born, 
206 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


207 


and marvel that they can willingly permit 
themselves to be exiled in permanence from 
its loveliness and its grace. 

I think of people much more than of 
localities when memory turns backward to 
Norfolk in the reconstruction days. Fore- 
most among those I revered and loved rises 
the saintly figure of the Rev. George D. 
Armstrong, at that time pastor of the Pres- 
byterian Church in which we worshipped. 
Northern residents in the South often com- 
plained of the incivility with which they 
were treated by those who looked upon their 
coming as an intrusion, and felt towards them 
something of the suspicion that seems to be 
an ingrained part of our nature whenever 
we have to do with foreigners. 

Undoubtedly, numbers of people had 
reason to complain, but for ourselves we had 
no cause for anything except appreciation of 
kindness shown. Dr. Armstrong was from 
the first our friend and his prayers and 
sermons are unforgotten. As a preacher he 
stood in the front rank. His sermons were 
eloquent, convincing and instructive. Little 
phrases return to me as when he defined a 
hypocrite as a play-actor, and spoke of 
mercy as “ favour shown by God, not to the 


208 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


undeserving but to the ill-deserving.” This 
benignant and scholarly man had been treated 
with harshness by General Benjamin F. But- 
ler, to the lasting regret of all who knew him 
and who knew the circumstances. Refusing 
for conscience’ sake to pray publicly for the 
President of the United States, he had been 
forced to wear a convict’s garb and toil in 
the sun, at Old Point. The imprisonment 
lasted, I believe, several months. That it 
was undergone for a single day seemed to 
me then, and seems to me now incredible, 
but war is war. Dr. Armstrong did not 
pray in my hearing for the President of the 
United States. In his pastoral prayer there 
was a general petition for those in authority 
over us, and he asked that we might live 
peaceable lives, in all godliness and honesty. 

As a member of his congregation and the 
teacher of a Bible Class in the Sunday-school 
I greatly enjoyed Dr. Armstrong’s ministra- 
tions. He laid strong foundations on which 
the Presbyterians of that section of Virginia 
have built firmly since his day. It was in 
keeping with the character of this good man 
that during the epidemic of yellow fever 
which some years before the war swept over 
Norfolk, he remained at his post of service. 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


209 


Hand in hand with other ministers of re- 
ligion and with the doctors and nurses who 
count not their lives dear in such times of 
extremity, he had gone from house to house, 
caring for the sick and burying the dead. 
He told me that one night when he had 
spent hour after hour in carrying food to the 
famishing and comfort to the dying he had 
in the dawn-light clasped hands with the 
good Roman Catholic priest who had been 
similarly occupied. Both men and others 
like them gave themselves without fear and 
without stint in heroic service to the com- 
munity in this emergency. The realization 
came to Dr. Armstrong then of the nearness 
of God and the brevity of life. He said he 
knew the meaning of the familiar couplet, 

“ Part of His host have crossed the flood, 

And part are crossing now.” 

I am fain to lay this leaf upon his honoured 
grave. Green be his memory. 

Another figure thrown up in relief on the 
canvas of the past is that of our good physi- 
cian, Dr. Samuel Selden. He was a man 
of rare skill, friendliness, and distinction 
of manner and breeding. Dr. Selden’s en- 
trance in a home where there was anxiety 


210 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


and pain was like that of a refreshing breeze. 
He was himself a continual martyr to pain 
and died in the prime of his manhood. 
Of all men whom I have known he had the 
largest toleration for those whose opinions 
differed from his, united with the strongest 
conviction in maintaining his own. He 
could argue without losing his temper; he 
had charity for those whose creed was oppo- 
site to his and he had a great love for little 
children. A sense of humour was part of his 
endowment for success, and had he lived 
longer he would have made for himself a 
name not alone in medicine, but in literature. 
Some of his poems were worthy to stand be- 
side those of Henry Timlow or Paul Hayne. 

Among the pleasantest recollections of this 
period are those that cluster around the 
naval contingent of Portsmouth. The men 
of our army and navy are gallant gentlemen, 
cordial and unaffected, and wherever and 
whenever one meets them one is in good 
society. The wives of naval officers often 
endure enforced separation from their hus- 
bands through the necessities of the service, 
but they have the compensation of enjoying 
a lifelong courtship. The naval people 
formed a coterie of their own, but it was the 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


211 


privilege of some of us to mingle with them 
in agreeable friendship. 

Among the most lasting associations of my 
life have been friendships established at this 
time with naval people not only, but with 
other Northern residents in Norfolk. Society 
%t the time had many interweaving circles 
and had groups that maintained themselves 
in aloofness from each other, touching like 
balls of ivory but never fusing. Certain in- 
cidents amusing in the retrospect were any- 
thing but diverting when they occurred. 
Those who remember the hard facts set down 
in “ A Fool’s Errand ” may have a faint idea 
of the hostility felt and expressed towards 
those good men and women who were con- 
cerned with the education of the freedmen. 
To be a negro teacher was to be socially 
ostracized and treated with silent contempt, 
if not with avowed disdain. A friend of 
mine to this day steadfast, staunch and true, 
was not to be hindered in taking the part of 
these despised home missionaries. He and 
his sweet wife who, as it happened, was 
Southern born, had the courage of their con- 
victions, entertained the young women who 
taught the coloured children, and in every way 
showed them kindness. In consequence, this 


212 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


man’s business interests suffered and he and 
his family were included in the dislike felt 
for those they championed. The insurance 
companies refused to take a risk on his prop- 
erty, and women who might have been proud 
to be the guests of his wife or to receive her 
beneath their roofs declined so much as 
to bow to her on the street. Her serene 
patience was now and then taxed by the ultra 
chivalry of her husband. On the occasion 
of a fair held by the coloured brethren to raise 
funds for the repair of their church they 
tried in vain to hire a piano, and on having 
a piano to enliven the scene they had set 
their hearts. An appeal was made to my 
friend, and he not desiring to rent an instru- 
ment on false pretenses sent a laconic note 
to his wife. She was a brilliant performer 
and among her wedding presents was a piano 
that was the pride of her home. Imagine 
this word dropped suddenly into her lap, as 
she sat on her veranda among the roses. 

“ Dearest, let these men have our piano. 
I will explain when I come home.” Her 
vow to love, honour and obey had been made 
so lately that its freshness was all unworn. 
She interpreted its significance literally, and 
without protest or delay, but with inward 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


213 


misgivings, permitted four burly men, their 
black, clumsy hands unused to the labour 
they undertook, to carry her beloved posses- 
sion down the steps of the porch, bumping it 
as they went, and she saw it lifted into their 
wagon and borne away. In due course of 
time it came back much the worse for wear, 
and at considerable cost was renovated. She 
smilingly told me not long ago that in 
later life she had learned to take counsel 
of prudence when prudence and charity 
clashed. 

My neighbours both Southern and North- 
ern were for the most part so strongly indi- 
vidual that I see them as if their portraits 
were hung in a photograph gallery. There 
was Gilbert Walker, tall erect and distin- 
guished for manly beauty, towering like Saul 
above his fellows, a neighbour who became 
Governor of Virginia in this reconstruction 
period. His wife from Binghamton, New 
York, whence also Mr. Walker came, had the 
charm and dignity that fitted her to stand 
by his side in a season of great difficulty, 
conciliating every one and promoting no 
animosity. 

There was Judge Dorman, courtliest and 
most dignified of men, over whose beautiful 


214 FROM MY YOUTH UP 

home presided a wife whom to know was to 
admire. 

But of these Northern friends I think less 
to-day than of a dear Southern matron who 
was to me a benignant angel of goodness 
while I was yet a stranger in a strange city. 

I recall, too, another who lives in memory 
chiefly as the most winning of talkers and 
the most inveterate of borrowers who ever 
crossed my path. There was absolutely 
nothing in the realm of housekeeping that 
sooner or later this lady did not ask as a 
loan, and I am sure she did so from the mo- 
tive which induced the Hebrew women of 
old to borrow what they wanted from their 
Egyptian neighbours. There was in this 
lady’s opinion no harm in spoiling the Phi- 
listines, and Philistines we were in her sight. 
I loaned her my best clothes and my lace 
mantilla, the new bonnet I had not yet worn 
and the parasol that I hoped to unfurl in 
pristine splendour over my own head. I lent 
her sugar and coffee and cake and bread and 
furniture. Whether she duly returned my 
goods or retained them at discretion we re- 
mained on good terms. She was a born 
raconteur and had the art of telling a story 
so cleverly that her presence dispelled 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


215 


tedium and insured a gratifying success 
whenever she was a guest at a social festiv- 
ity. She was not unlike, in her ability to 
chat pleasingly, most women of her period 
in the Old Dominion. In a certain social 
queenliness not in the least lessened by a 
sadly diminished fortune, she bore all before 
her. 

One afternoon her youngest boy, a hand- 
some little fellow of ten, had violated the 
law that prohibited swimming in the day- 
time at a point adjacent to his home. He 
and a half dozen little chaps of his own age 
were arrested by a United States officer, the 
city being then under martial law, and were 
taken to the guard-house. When the news 
was brought to his mother she undauntedly 
sallied forth and stepping into the presence 
of the lieutenant in charge, greeted him 
with the utmost courtesy and informed him 
that she had come to take those foolish 
children home at once. The lieutenant de- 
murred, but the lady was firm. “ Their re- 
maining here is not to be considered,” she 
said with the air of a reigning sovereign. 
“ Fines would have to be paid,” intimated 
the officer. “ Fines ! ” replied the lady. 
“ Where should we get money to pay them ? 


216 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


You have already taken all we have. Pray 
let me consume no more of your time. Let 
me have the children immediately. ” 

“ You will be responsible for their not 
transgressing again ? ” said the lieutenant, 
not reluctant to release the culprits, and 
with a gracious wave of her hand and a 
pleasant word, his visitor assured him that 
there should be no further infraction of the 
law. “ IT1 speak for my boy,” she said, 
“ and I’ll take it on me to say that none of 
these boys shall in any way offend again.” 
So she and they departed in peace. 

My first acquaintance with a brick oven 
was made while I lived in Norfolk. The 
presiding genius in my kitchen was Aunt 
Hannah, superb as an empress in her bear- 
ing, black as ebony and straight as an oak 
tree. Her magnificent carriage of head and 
shoulders was the result of “ toting ” bur- 
dens on her head in childhood and girlhood. 
Her boast was that in her teens she could 
dance with a pail of water on her head with- 
out spilling a drop. Her corn bread, her 
white loaves, her roast and broiled meat had 
a taste that no chef of princely salary in a 
modern hotel could impart. She would 
bake her breakfast breads in a spider set on 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


217 


the coals, and nothing that I have eaten 
since has had their delicious flavour. She 
had a meek little husband who fetched and 
carried for her as if he had been a boy 
though he was some years her senior. 

When we moved from one house to 
another, the distance not being very great, 
the family walked, and great was my as- 
tonishment to behold Aunt Hannah and 
Uncle Ed arriving in state in a carriage 
drawn by two horses driven by a hackman 
of impressive dignity. Feeling slightly dis- 
posed to resent this display on her part 
I inquired why she had chosen to drive 
when her mistress walked ? “ Law, honey,” 

she said, laughing until her whole frame 
shook, “ Use got de dinner to cook. I done 
thought all about it, and I ’rived at de con- 
clusion dat Ed and I better come dis away. 
You can sit still and fold yo* hands. Den, 
too,” she went on, “ I want dat cook next 
door to see me fust time steppin’ out of a 
carriage.” 

One had to learn the dispositions of 
coloured servants in those days. They were 
new to freedom and scarcely understood it. 
They were simple-hearted and very much 
like children in need of guidance and re- 


218 FEOM MY YOUTH UP 

straint. Northern women did not invari- 
ably receive their respect as Southern 
matrons did. Accustomed to the prompt- 
ness and energy of housekeeping in North- 
ern kitchens, the Northern matron exacted 
both too much and too little. She failed to 
comprehend the easy good-nature and the 
unhurried leisure of her cook and house- 
maid. She mistook their familiarity, affec- 
tionate and respectful, for impertinence, and 
reproved them accordingly. Where the 
Southern mistress knew how to govern, to 
leave the reins loose on occasion and to draw 
them tightly when necessary, her Northern 
sister grew discouraged and very likely sent 
home for an Irish or German maid. Wash- 
ing and ironing, for instance, were not com- 
pleted in the orthodox New England fashion 
on Monday and Tuesday. The laundry 
work was apt to drag until the end of the 
week, but it was well done and satisfactory 
when at last it was finished. The principle 
on which it was accomplished was ingenu- 
ously explained to me by a certain very 
competent Sarah. “ Where’s de use,” she 
said, “ in my gettin’ through dis befo’ Satur- 
day ? You all fin’ somethin’ else fo’ me to 
do.” 


A SOUTHERN TOWN 


219 


This same Sarah, a treasure in other re- 
spects, had her periods of eclipse. When the 
desire to drink came upon her she disap- 
peared, and suffered no one to see her in her 
lapses from virtue. She would be gone a 
week at a time, come back ready for three or 
four months of steady service and then sink 
below the surface again. 

I have looked from my window in the 
early morning and have seen emerging from 
my kitchen door a half dozen dusky figures 
who slipped away, soft-footed, and were seen 
no more that day. I knew perfectly well 
that my cook gave shelter for the night, to 
her friends, and I did not remonstrate, for 
the kitchen was in the yard a little distance 
from the house, and it and the rooms above 
it were supposed to be hers. If she wanted 
to be hospitable I did not oppose her. 

When I first began housekeeping in the 
South I observed to the amusement of my 
neighbours that they might carry a key 
basket if they chose, but that I had never 
locked anything up and did not propose to 
begin then. Only a few weeks passed before 
I learned that my coloured servitors imagined 
themselves free to take what they wanted 
from pantry shelves left unguarded. This 


220 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


was not so much because they wished to be 
dishonest or had the habit of stealing, but 
from a half-formed idea that whatever was 
intended for daily use in the way of food 
and left open was to be used as they liked. 
The bunch of keys and the little basket in 
which they reposed became my constant 
companion, and I learned to give out each 
morning flour, butter, eggs, sugar, whatever 
else was to be used for the day, and then 
turned the key on the storeroom. This was 
never resented. The good old aunties were 
used to it and did not understand any other 
method of procedure. 

On the whole, there was much less friction 
and far more amiability than might have 
been expected in the social relations of every 
one, rich and poor, lettered and illiterate, 
white and black in those days in Virginia 
just after the war. Very soon after battles 
are over Nature spreads the scarred fields 
with cloth of gold and velvet turf. So, in 
hearts that have been at enmity Peace drops 
a kindly balm, and there are more flowers 
than thorns as the days go by. 


XVII 

MY LITERARY MASTERS 

“T^TTITH the Bible, Homer and 
VV Shakespeare,” said a friend, 
T " glancing at me from the bow of 
the boat as we glided over the blue waters of 
the Merrimac, “ I should not mind being 
cast away on a desert island. I could dis- 
pense with all the books that have ever been 
written, and feel myself in good company if 
these were my companions.” 

As for me, I have never arrived at a 
definite decision, the Bible excepted, as to 
the books that I should prefer to all others if 
condemned to solitary existence. The books 
that have influenced my thought and en- 
tered into my experience have been many, 
and at different seasons and in contrasting 
situations I have cared for different books. 
I am convinced that my debt for help in 
time of need is larger to the writers of 
essays and biography than to the poets and 
the novelists. 

Among poets, those at whose feet I have 
221 


222 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


loved to sit, whose music has charmed me 
and whose wisdom has been illuminating in 
hours of gloom, have been Milton, Tennyson, 
Browning and Whittier. I love the long 
roll of Homer's verse, and have found in- 
spiration in Virgil and Dante. English 
literature, however, especially of the Eliza- 
bethan and Victorian periods, has meant 
more to me than the lore of the ancients, 
and I never tire of turning again and again 
to the two magnificent poets who have lived 
in my own time, and whose voices were 
hushed only a little while ago. 

The poetry of Tennyson, so profoundly 
philosophical, so devoutly religious and so 
finished in style and diction seems to me 
like a great cathedral lifting its glorious 
height and its tapering spires to the vaulted 
sky. 

One has no difficulty in understanding 
Tennyson, even when the truths he utters 
are the most sublime. His art has the 
merit of lucidity. In his orchestra no in- 
strument is ever out of tune. 

He loved nature and he adored the God of 
nature, and whatever he said was at once a 
marvel of accuracy and of beauty. I could 
spare nothing for myself that Tennyson 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


223 


wrote, from his earliest to his latest verse. 
I gladly acknowledge him as a master who 
has taught me much, as a musician who has 
given me songs at morning and evening, 
and cheered me in the night season. 

To love Tennyson as I do and equally to 
appreciate and almost worship Browning is 
apparently a contradiction in terms. Never 
were two men less similar. Tennyson hid 
himself from the public, and his habits 
resembled those of the hermit thrush. To 
the few who shared his confidence he was 
singularly frank and childlike, but he was 
British to the core, his house was his castle 
and he not merely disliked intrusion and re- 
sented it, but held himself aloof from social 
engagements for which he had neither time 
nor inclination. He lived for and in the 
circle of his kindred, a group of dear friends 
and the art to which he paid the devotion of 
his entire life. 

Browning shone in the drawing-room, was 
a brilliant talker, and his expansive manner 
of greeting acquaintances placed people at 
their ease, and gave those with whom he 
came in contact a peculiar delight. Tenny- 
son and Carlyle might spend a whole even- 
ing together without the exchange of a 


224 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


word, and separate with entire satisfaction 
after their silent interchange of thought. 
Browning, when Carlyle in his old age went 
with William Allingham to return a call, 
fairly enveloped the sage in the radiance 
and sunshine of a welcome that almost 
reached hyperbole. Browning might have 
been an architect, a historian, a sculptor, a 
painter or a musician. He had a cosmopoli- 
tan knowledge of facts, and was versatile in 
an extraordinary degree. Browning, like 
Tennyson, was a disciple of Christ, and his 
works are characterized by faith and devo- 
tion. He had sincere reverence for woman 
and his rugged verse preaches an austere 
morality. 

If, with Tennyson, one walks the aisles of 
great cathedrals, with Browning one ascends 
the steep mountainsides and gazes from 
their summits across a vast territory, across 
smiling landscapes, foaming rivers and bil- 
lowy seas. Browning probed the depths of 
the human soul, and laid bare the wounds 
of the social body with the keen unerring 
certainty of the surgeon's knife. One can- 
not get at the heart of Browning without 
prolonged and severe study, but one is re- 
paid for every exertion when Browning is 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


225 


revealed in his fullness and majesty. I once 
spent a whole summer on “ The Ring and 
the Book,” and at the end felt that my 
labour had not been in vain. The shelf on 
which stand my volumes of Browning has 
for me a personal interest so intimate and 
precious that nothing would induce me to 
exchange those well-worn books for any 
other edition. 

For years it was a custom with me 
amounting nearly to a rite to read “ Para- 
dise Lost ” and “ The Ode to the Nativity ” 
at least once in the twelvemonth. Milton’s 
accumulation of learning, his resplendent 
vocabulary and his daring upward flights 
are unparalleled in the range of literature. 
I could live without most of the great 
masters of poetry and make no moan, but 
the three whom I have here mentioned have 
been my teachers, and it would be a heart- 
felt grief should memory some time prove 
treacherous and drop the wealth I have 
committed to it from their amazing store. 

There are moods in which I love Keats, 
Shelley, Wordsworth and Campbell. There 
are hours when Emerson and Longfellow, 
chief among American singers, give me joy. 
Probably Longfellow and Emerson are re- 


226 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


garded by most critics as poets of a higher 
order than John Greenleaf Whittier. To 
me, in that he has ministered to my hours 
of sorrow, and uplifted me in my hours of 
gladness, he is greater than they. When in 
the gathering dusk I can sit by the fire and 
recall “ The Eternal Goodness,” or “ My 
Psalm,” it is as if a breath of heaven were 
wafted through the room. I have heard a 
thousand young girls in college singing at 
vespers those familiar stanzas of Whittier 
beginning with 

We may not climb the heavenly steeps 
To bring the Lord Christ down ; 

In vain we search the lowest deeps 
For Him no depths can drown. 

But warm, sweet, tender even yet 
A present help is He, 

And faith has still its Olivet 
And love its Galilee, 

and my eyes have filled with tears, and my 
heart has poured itself out in prayer and 
praise for the message God gave our Quaker 
poet. His lyrics belong to the altar and the 
fireside, the closet and the home. During 
the Civil War his martial poems had now 
the clang of steel, and again the sound of a 
trumpet blast. 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


227 


Whittier possessed the fervour of the old 
prophets, their sternness, their rhythm and 
their glow. Once it was my privilege to 
spend an hour in his company. I met him 
in Amesbury, not in his own home, but in 
that of a cousin whom he was visiting. 
There came into the library where I waited 
to meet him under the wing of his friend and 
mine, Harriet Prescott SpofFord, three beau- 
tiful old people. They were tall and spare, 
with dark eyes and clear-cut profiles. The 
age of each was beyond seventy-five, but 
they made an impression of undimmed youth 
and childlike sweetness beneath their snowy 
hair. One of Whittier’s cousins was a man 
of his own age, nearly fourscore : the other, 
a sweet old gentlewoman in the exquisitely 
spotless dress of the Friends, with quaint cap 
and kerchief. They used the plain speech, 
saying “ thee ” and “ thou,” and to my de- 
light they addressed me by my name. I 
have never forgotten the gracious benediction 
that came to me when Whittier took my 
hand and said, “ It is our Margaret Sangster. 
I am glad to see thee.” His talk that day 
drifts back to me over the intervening years 
with electric flashes of humour, a wistful 
seriousness and a benign sincerity. From 


228 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


my masters in poetry I cannot drop the 
name, honoured and beloved, of John Green- 
leaf Whittier. 

Turning to the essayists I pay my debt of 
gratitude to Hazlitt, Lamb, Macauley, Carlyle 
and Robert Louis Stevenson. The place of 
the essay in literature is that of the corner- 
stone on which an edifice may be built. The 
essay may include history, invade the novel 
and occasionally penetrate into poetry. Not 
one of the essayists whom I have named, each 
of whom has taught me many things, to 
each of whom I am under deep obligation, 
has yet been worth to me for daily use and 
wont so much as John Ruskin. It would 
be impossible for me to overstate my apprecia- 
tion of Ruskin’s felicitous style and my love 
for the charm and melody of his prose. 

His choice of words is without a flaw. 
The word that fits his thought is exactly 
chosen and shines in its surrounding setting 
with the lustre of a jewel. Perhaps he is 
sometimes too affluent in metaphor, some- 
times over-fond of alliteration, and undoubt- 
edly he is often too caustic in blame and too 
enthusiastic in praise, but he was a loyal lover 
and a good hater, and in the truest sense of 
the word, a courtly gentleman. Among my 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


229 


masters in literature I rejoice to pay a tribute 
to John Ruskin, tender and true, knightly 
and brave, the friend of the poor and the 
servant of Christ. 

Three men have lately gone from us who 
have left vacant places in my heart. The 
world is poorer for the loss of Algernon 
Charles Swinburne, a poet whose prose was 
richer than his verse. The latter was open 
to criticism; the former is unsurpassed. 
George Meredith had qualities that reminded 
the reader of Browning. His “ Diana of the 
Crossways ” must be considered his master- 
piece by the lovers of good novels since it 
well bears the test of reading a third and 
a fourth time. For F. Marion Crawford, 
dying in the meridian of his years, all lovers 
of literature must feel deep regret. His was 
the art preeminently of telling a story well, 
and his group of Italian novels, in which the 
same characters appear and reappear, possesses 
a real claim to immortality. 

Shall I name here the novelists who rank 
highest in my affection ? George Eliot, who 
touched high-water mark in “ Middlemarch,” 
Charles Dickens whose “ Tale of Two Cities ” 
and “ Little Dorrit ” are my chief favourites 
where it is difficult to make a choice, Will- 


230 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


iam Makepeace Thackera} r whose “ Vanity 
Fair ” and “ The Newcomes ” are among my 
treasures, and Robert Louis Stevenson whose 
“ Kidnapped ” and “ David Balfour ” I read 
again and again with never-ceasing pleasure. 
I cannot omit a tribute to George Macdonald 
whose mysticism and other- worldliness be- 
long to the sphere of the preacher as fully as 
to that of the novelist. 

Margaret Oliphant must have a place in 
this company of great ones. In the variety 
of her stories, from “ Margaret Maitland ” to 
“ Kirsteen ” she excels any contemporary 
writer. Producing an enormous amount of 
fiction and at the same time writing biog- 
raphy and history, she seldom fell below the 
highest standard. Her pictures of English 
and Scottish interiors are worthy a painter of 
the first order, and her portrait gallery of 
lovely 'maidens and fair matrons can never 
fade. She was weaker than George Eliot 
in her delineation of men. She far out- 
stripped her in her comprehension of women. 
Her “ Life of Edward Irving ” is a classic, 
and her memoir of her kinsman, Lawrence 
Oliphant, is very nearly as fine. 

I cannot leave this page without a back- 
ward glance. I should be derelict indeed if 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


231 


I did not here speak of Jane Austen, as much 
a writer for to-day as for yesterday, and of 
Charlotte and Emily Bronte, those gifted 
daughters of the Haworth Rectory, who took 
the world by storm. 

Should I forsake this part of my subject 
without a word of appreciation for American 
writers of fiction my story would be incom- 
plete. Of those whose work abides let me 
first name Nathaniel Hawthorne, and next one 
whose genius shows no diminution and whose 
latest novels are stronger than his earliest, 
our beloved and honoured William Dean 
Howells. No one who esteems literary work 
at its highest and fiction at its best can for an 
instant forget the services Mr. Howells has 
freely given to our English tongue. It is a 
pleasure to have known him in personal as- 
sociation, to be familiar with his methods 
and aware of his unfailing courtesy to 
novices in the literary field. 

In biography I am as much at a loss to 
make definite selection as I am when into my 
den there drifts on the incoming tide of the 
morning mail a perplexing inquiry from 
some one about my favourite flower or my 
favourite colour or my favourite character in 
history. Who shall decide questions so sub- 


232 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


tie : who shall choose among flowers, from 
the daisy of June to the goldenrod of Sep- 
tember ? Which of the characters standing 
like beacon-lights in history shall one venture 
to say she cares for most, all the way from 
Moses and Samuel and David to Washington 
and Lincoln and McKinley ? One has many 
preferences and life has many aspects. So it 
is in the realm of biography. The story of 
any human life, however obscure, has for me 
a positive attraction, and I have frequently 
bought at a second-hand shop an odd volume 
containing the life and letters of some one 
whose name I have never heard, and in that 
recital of a life unknown to fame I have found 
meat for sustenance and honey for sweet- 
ness. 

I repeat that the story of any human life 
simply told is helpful to those at present liv- 
ing on the earth and faring onward to an- 
other world. Longfellow says 

Lives of great men all remind us 
We can make our lives sublime, 

And departing leave behind us 
Footprints on the sands of time. 

But it is not only the lives of earth's great 
men, her mighty men of valour, her states- 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


233 


men, warriors and men of renown that give 
us aid. Lives of heroic missionaries toiling 
on through hard and uneventful years, lives 
of young girls early called to the home-land, 
lives of martyrs and confessors, lives of quiet 
women whose sphere of duty was limited or 
whose larger sphere was filled with earnest 
activity, these lives bless the world. 

I suppose I cannot speak of this depart- 
ment of literature in the identical sense in 
which I speak of poetry and fiction, of science 
and philosophy, yet if those who write biog- 
raphy have not been my literary masters, 
they have been in a very intimate and pro- 
found relation my literary friends and ex- 
emplars. The autobiography of Mrs. Oli- 
phant, touching record that it is of a brave 
life spent in the service of the home dear 
ones, thrills me as often as I read it. Au- 
gustus Hare’s “ Memorials of a Quiet Life ” 
and his “ Life of the Baroness Bunson ” have 
become incorporated with my tenderest recol- 
lections and most hallowed hours. The auto- 
biography of Anthony Trollope, that robust, 
stout-hearted man of letters, has meant much 
to me as to many another literary toiler. 
“ The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson ” is a 
tonic and a cordial, an inspiration and a call 


234 FROM MY YOUTH UP 

to labour, let it enter any home. Lady 
Burne-Jones in her biography of her gifted 
husband, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, intro* 
duces us into the midst of that interesting 
pre-Raphaelite group, every one of whom 
was individual in his manner of work and 
all of whom wrought to purpose. 

Mr. Robert E. Speer, in several unpretend- 
ing and brief biographies of valiant young 
people who early finished their task and 
heard the Master’s call to higher service, has 
opened a window, with an outlook towards 
heaven, in every Christian household into 
which these books of his are brought. 

There are books partly biographical, such 
as the beautiful monograph entitled “ My 
Father ” in which Reverend Doctor W. Rob- 
ertson Nicoll takes us into the manse near 
Aberdeen where the country minister gradu- 
ally accumulated a library of many thousand 
volumes. Another book of the same char- 
acter, but wholly opposite in treatment and 
intention is “ Father and Son ” by Edmund 
Gosse, and a book perfect of its kind under 
this special heading is J. M. Barrie’s “ Mar- 
garet Ogilvie.” I have not space for a cata- 
logue. Should I try to make one the rest of 
this book would not be written. 


MY LITERARY MASTERS 


235 


Let Longfellow again epitomize the mis- 
sion and the message of sterling biography. 

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant, 

Let the dead past bury its dead. 

Act, act in the living present, 

Heart within and God overhead. 


XVIII 

THE HAPPIEST DAYS 

I SOMETIMES ask myself whether I 
would if I could live my life over again. 
Then follows naturally in vague specu- 
lation the inquiry, “ Which portion of it has 
been, on the whole, the most interesting, the 
happiest, the least burdened and the fullest 
of hope and anticipation ? ” These questions 
come to every one. Dr. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes in a sparkling lyric drew the picture 
of a man in his prime, his wife and children 
around him, sitting with eyes half-closed 
and dreaming of the past. The man wanted 
to be once more a boy. An angel appeared 
offering him the chance to have the vanished 
boyhood restored if he would resign the sat- 
isfactions of his manhood. In the end 

“The angel took a sapphire pen 
And wrote in rainbow dew, 

1 The man would be a boy again 
And be a husband, too.’ ” 

In an enchanting story by William Morris 
we are transported to a glittering plain on 
236 


THE HAPPIEST DAYS 


237 


the farther shore of the sea that we must 
cross to reach the life immortal. The story 
is utterly pagan, but it has upon it the sheen, 
diamond-threaded, of the old mythologies. 
On the shining shore that they have reached 
after weary strife and hardships nobly borne, 
we find a band of warriors who have dropped 
old age and forgotten the scars of the world. 
They have stepped into the glory of youth 
and strength. Alas, as they have tasted the 
fountain of youth, the memory of their past 
has escaped them and with it has gone the 
wealth that only memory hoards for the 
soul. 

The Christian’s heaven shall be better 
than this. We shall put on youth and 
strength when we have crossed the sea, but 
we shall keep our memory of the earth-life 
and know our dear ones when they meet us 
again. For this consummation we can well 
afford to wait. It is only a wistful yearning 
after all that prompts this lingering over 
other days. They were sweet and beauti- 
ful, but so are these in which we live. Day 
follows day in ceaseless march. The child 
by imperceptible degrees grows to adoles- 
cence, the young people married or single go 
on to middle age, and the middle-aged grow 


238 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


old. Supremely blessed are they who never 
lose the child-heart. Other losses may be 
accepted without demur, but whosoever loses 
the heart of the child is bankrupt in hope 
and joy until the journey’s end. 

Those were beautiful years of mine that 
were spent in the twenties and early thirties, 
years so care-free, so blithe, so buoyant that I 
often fancy that another woman lived them 
and not I. There were children growing up 
in the home, guests were coming and going 
constantly, and every day some ship of joy 
came gliding into harbour with sails full set 
and a favouring breeze. I took lightly little 
disappointments and endured without a 
murmur occasional trials. Nothing could 
depress a spirit as elastic as that which was 
my blissful endowment. I rarely felt fa- 
tigue. I thought nothing of taking long 
rides across country on horseback, or driving, 
if need were, the livelong day. 

It amuses some of my younger kinsfolk 
to hear that I was at one time noted much 
more for the feathery lightness of my ome- 
lets and the golden brown of my breakfast 
muffins than for bits of advice in the shape 
of letters or bits of song in the shape of 
poems. Little did it daunt me if things 


THE HAPPIEST DAYS 


239 


went wrong in the kitchen or the markets 
failed to send what I wanted for an evening 
company. I was a resourceful housekeeper, 
able to turn my hand at will to any task. 
I must confess that I did not like sewing, 
but I happened to have a friend who did, 
and I well remember how often she came 
to me with thimble and needle, tossing off 
the stockings I ought to have darned and 
the garments I ought to have mended, with 
an ease and thoroughness that were simply 
amazing. I seem to have given her little 
to pay for her kindness, except unstinted 
thanks. Nevertheless, she who had fewer 
home duties than I assumed for me the 
affectionate tasks of a sister and shared my 
regard as a sister might have done. She 
died years ago before her golden hair had 
lost its brightness or her cheek its bloom. 
If we did not take pains to keep our friend' 
ships in repair, if we were not all the while 
making new friends, how lonely we should 
be when we reached the home stretch. 

We had friends who habitually took Sun- 
day night supper with us. They, like our- 
selves, were from the North and we had 
much in common. Between five and six on 
Sunday afternoon, when the church services 


24:0 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


and Sunday-schools were over, this husband 
and wife would arrive. He was a grave, 
rather silent, scholarly man ; she a light- 
hearted, merry little woman whose nursery 
was crowded. Her children had come 
rapidly and when they stood in a row one 
thought of a stairway with steps close 
together. Those Sunday evenings were ex- 
tremely pleasant. The children had retired, 
supper being over, and we would sit in 
summer on the vine-shaded veranda. In 
winter we would linger in the low-ceiled 
library where books lined the walls. There 
were plants in the windows and pine-knots 
blazing on the hearth. We would fall into 
intimate talk. There is something ideal in 
the friendships of congenial married people 
who are on the same general standing-ground 
as to age and circumstances. If they enter- 
tain similar views upon politics and sympa- 
thize in religious convictions they are sure 
to find stimulation and refreshment when 
they meet. 

One Monday morning very early there 
was a knock at our door and we heard the 
Major’s voice calling anxiously. Nothing 
had been wrong at ten o’clock the night be- 
fore, but we knew in an instant that he had 


THE HAPPIEST DAYS 


241 


not come from the other end of town before 
the dawn without a good reason. Soon we 
were enlightened. “ The baby is dying,” he 
said. “ She has been poisoned. Come to 
us as quickly as you can.” He disappeared 
and in a few moments we followed him, 
hurrying through the silent streets with a 
great fear tugging at our hearts. The baby 
had been poisoned, not by accident, but on 
purpose, by an ignorant and vindictive nurse- 
maid who considered herself aggrieved and 
took this dreadful method for revenge. 
Fortunately the dear little thing did not die. 
Through the hours of a summer day her 
mother and I, with the aid of two excellent 
doctors, fought for the rescue of the flutter- 
ing life, and at sunset she was out of danger. 
How the years have passed. I have held 
the children of that baby in my arms, and 
I may yet see her grandchildren. 

We had neighbourly ways of helping one 
another in that Southern town where the 
roses were so sweet and the lilies so white 
and the hearts of good people so kind. Were 
visitors announced unexpectedly, and had 
one nothing one wished to set before them 
for a meal, one's next door neighbour would 
without hesitation exchange her roast chick- 


242 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ens and her cherry pie for one’s left-over 
cold meat and warmed-over pudding. If it 
happened to a hostess, as it once did to me, 
to have a clean sweep made by a predatory 
butler of everything planned for a dinner 
party, the butler, of course, disappearing, 
too, the neighbours were ready to rush to the 
rescue. 

The expected guests in my case were friends 
belonging to the navy, and the neighbours, so 
eager to assist, Southerners who had not yet 
ceased to grieve over the defeat of secession. 
None of those matrons were disposed to 
censure the young housekeeper from the 
North who had arranged her festivity to the 
minutest detail before ten o’clock in the 
morning, and had gone with her children to 
spend the day in the woods. The despair of 
the cook and my bewilderment at the situ- 
ation when the dire catastrophe burst upon 
me, are as fresh in mind as if the incident 
had occurred last week, as fresh in mind 
also is the fact that an impromptu dinner, 
rather original and unconventional and 
largely composed of borrowed viands, went 
off very well. Not a guest suspected that 
anything had been amiss. 

If again it happened that a wife and 


THE HAPPIEST DAYS 


243 


mother in need of a change of scene was ad- 
vised by her physician to take an outing 
away from home, and if she had no one 
with whom to leave her children, a neigh- 
bour would hospitably open her doors and 
invite the children in to stay during their 
mother’s absence. No one counted the cost 
of such an invitation, and there did not 
loom before any one’s mind the spectral fear 
of the servants that is a formidable bar to 
hospitality at present. Our cooks and house- 
maids are by way of showing us plainly 
enough that they survey visitors as invaders 
of their rights, and whether they be of one 
country or another, one colour or one creed, 
their attitude is inimical to the exercise of 
hospitality. 

We had no such obstacles to encounter, 
for the coloured people who served us had 
recently emerged from an atmosphere in 
which hospitality was taken for granted like 
the sunshine and the air. They were happi- 
est provided they were not hurried, when 
the house was full and there was the stir 
and excitement of visitors about, whether 
the visitors were old or young. To think 
for an instant whether Aunt Hannah would 
be annoyed if the number of persons for 


244 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


whom she had to cook was doubled or 
trebled would have been impossible to a 
matron in the South between 1865 and 1870. 
The matron is to be congratulated who pos- 
sesses similar independence in the North to- 
day. 

In the service of a friend soon after the 
war there was an all-round man named 
John. He was black but comely, a tall, 
handsome fellow in his prime. John was 
an indispensable and efficient outdoor and 
indoor man. There was nothing he could 
not and little he did not do in managing the 
household of his mistress. All her friends 
knew and every one respected him. He 
had the courtly manner of the Southern 
gentleman whose property he had at one 
time been, and who had given him his train- 
ing. John had a young wife, a pretty little 
butterfly of a woman whom we also knew. 
Caroline did laundry work in her home and 
kept the hearth bright and shining for John. 

One night when as usual he went home 
after the day’s work, he found sitting with 
Caroline a woman, gaunt-featured, weary 
and worn with the toil of many years on a 
rice plantation in the South. I mean in the 
South beyond Virginia, the bondage of 


THE HAPPIEST DAYS 


245 


which the negroes of Virginia looked upon 
with unspeakable dismay. In an instant 
John knew who this was, this wayfarer who 
had discovered that she was free, and had 
walked, begging every step of her way, 
back to her old home and the husband of 
her youth. They had belonged to different 
masters, and when hers died, Meliss had 
been sold as part of the estate, a young, 
strong woman, and John had been left. 

How should he choose between Caroline 
and Meliss? The choice was a hard one, 
but John decided that he must let Caroline 
go and accept again as his wife the woman 
who had been absent from him, in a silence 
like death, for more than twenty years. 
The coloured people at that time did not hold 
the marriage bond in great sacredness, and 
as Caroline had numerous admirers, she 
flitted away from John apparently without 
a pang. The old woman, looking at first 
more like her husband’s mother than his 
wife, slipped into her rightful place, and 
John seemed no less contented with her 
than he had been with her youthful suc- 
cessor. His face was as impassive as ever, 
his manner as perfect, his service as com- 
plete. The incident gave me the germ of 


246 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


the first short story I wrote, a sketch to 
which allusion has been made already, as it 
gave me my start in authorship. 

Although no shadow of the future had yet 
been thrown across our path, there was ap- 
proaching for our home, in the progress of 
the marching days, a change that was un- 
foreseen and undreaded. We decided in 1870 
that we would return to the North. The 
happy years of my married life reached 
their conclusion in 1871. From that time 
life took on a more sombre and a wholly 
different aspect. 

























. 





























■ 




























































From a Photograph taken in Norfolk, Virginia, 1868, 



XIX 


NEW ADJUSTMENTS 

W HILE a resident of Norfolk I had 
been an occasional contributor to 
the Christian Intelligencer and the 
Sunday-school Times. Once in a while I 
had sent a bit of verse or a prose sketch to 
the Independent , and at intervals my name 
had appeared in the columns of Hearth and 
Home. With the editors of these publica- 
tions I had enjoyed a desultory but agreea- 
ble correspondence. After my return to 
Brooklyn I resolved to put aside the feeling 
of diffidence and reserve that made me re- 
luctant to intrude on an editor in his private 
office. The guarded precincts of an edito- 
rial den were to my thought much like the 
palace chambers of a reigning sovereign. 

Taking my courage in both hands I one 
day ventured to call upon Mr. Oliver John- 
son, the managing editor of the Independent. 
I found him an elderly gentleman with courtly 
old-school manners. He greeted me with a 
suavity and gracious kindness that made me 
247 


248 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


forget that I was not in a drawing-room. 
His fine old face and shock of snowy hair 
bespoke him in the later sixties. His eyes 
under shaggy brows were keen and full of 
fire. A few moments passed in the amenities 
of making acquaintance, when Mr. Johnson 
turned to me and abruptly asked, “ How old 
are you ? ” He smiled as I frankly replied, 
and said with a half sigh, “ You have a 
sunny path before you. You are young.” I 
hoped the words might prove prophetic, al- 
though I did not care whether the path were 
to be sunny or clouded. I had tasted the 
sweets of encouragement, if not of success, 
and I desired, if I could, to tread the path 
over which others had forged and to which 
editors had the open sesame. Mr. Johnson 
gave me what I lacked, confidence in myself, 
and although I did not become then or 
afterwards a frequent contributor to the In- 
dependent, I valued his cheery Godspeed. 

My next incursion of the kind was 
prompted by an impulse that in turn was due 
to an incident in the morning newspaper. 
Something that I read at the breakfast table 
gave me the motive for a poem and as pen 
and paper were near my hand I wrote a half- 
dozen stanzas then and there. On reading 


NEW ADJUSTMENTS 


249 


them over it became evident that as they 
were seasonable their appearance in print 
must be arranged for immediately, or else 
they might lie in my portfolio until they 
would lose their significance. Should I trust 
them to the post-office, or instead take them 
personally as an offering to Hearth and 
Home f I knew by intuition the niche into 
which my poem would fit. This, let me say 
in passing, is an extremely helpful gift if one 
is anticipating consecration to literary pursuit. 
The ability to decide beforehand the channel 
on which one’s little ships are to be launched 
is an asset worth possessing, and it is not by 
any means bestowed upon every youthful ad- 
venturer. 

Armed with my lyric I crossed the river 
and walked up Fulton Street to Broadway. 
The editorial rooms of Hearth and Home 
were situated near the top of a six story 
building not far from the City Hall Park. 
I walked to and fro in front of that building 
uncertain whether to enter or after all post 
my verses in the box at the corner, and my 
irresolution lasted almost a half hour. Fi- 
nally, my instinctive dislike to be beaten in 
an enterprise triumphed over my correspond- 
ing dislike to present my poetry for sale, and 


250 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


I stepped into the building and began my up- 
ward climb. Little did I dream that the 
time was approaching when I should mount 
those stairs several days a week to an office 
of my own. 

Edward Eggleston had lately resigned the 
editorial charge of Hearth and Home. Un- 
der his care it had developed into a house- 
hold magazine of the highest type, a prede- 
cessor in some of its best features of the 
magazines for women and the household that 
are conspicuously successful at present. Dr. 
Eggleston had become the pastor of an in- 
fluential church and was besides devoting a 
great deal of time to literature. His “ Hoo- 
sier Schoolmaster ” had achieved popularity, 
describing as it did with fidelity and fresh- 
ness the rural life of Indiana and the experi- 
ences of a Methodist circuit rider. He fol- 
lowed it by several novels of Western life and 
by interesting studies in Colonial history. 

At the time of my visit his younger 
brother, Mr. George Cary Eggleston, had suc- 
ceeded him in the editor’s chair. I remem- 
ber, as though my call had been made this 
week, the tall, dark-eyed and cordial man on 
the sunny side of thirty who rose to receive 
me. Mr. Eggleston had been a Confederate 


NEW ADJUSTMENTS 


251 


soldier and he was every inch the chivalrous 
Virginian. My talk with him grew friendly 
on the instant. He not only read my poem 
without delay, but delighted me unspeakably 
by sending it at once to the printer with an 
order that it should appear in the issue then 
going to press. Before I took leave I had 
promised to write a series of articles for 
Hearth and Home , had ascertained that Mr. 
Eggleston lived in Brooklyn as I did, and 
that he had a wife and child. I learned, too, 
that the Egglestons had not long been domi- 
ciled in what was then denominated the City 
of Churches, and that Mrs. Eggleston would 
be pleased to receive a call from one who 
knew the city better than herself. A few 
days later I called on the little lady and very 
naturally we soon drifted into friendship. 

These incidents took place some months 
before I considered the possibility of regard- 
ing literature as a vocation. A year had 
passed when one evening Mr. Eggleston 
called upon me at my home. He opened 
the conversation by the startling request 
that I would accept a position about to be- 
come vacant on the staff of his weekly 
magazine. “ Hearth and Home” he re- 
marked, “ is to sustain a serious loss in the 


252 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


near future. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge is 
leaving it to become the editor of a new 
magazine for children, and the publishers 
have authorized me to offer to you the posi- 
tion from which she withdraws.” He 
went on further to say that the decision had 
been reached after conference on the part of 
all concerned, and that as editor-in-chief he 
particularly hoped that I would not decline 
the opening. 

I listened to Mr. Eggleston’s proposition 
in a maze of bewilderment. The offer was 
flattering and the invitation alluring. The 
salary attached to the post was liberal. 
Still I hesitated. “ I know nothing,” I said, 
“ of the inner side of journalism. I think I 
can write for children, but of the making up 
of forms and of editorial work I am as 
ignorant as any child. I have never been 
obliged to step outside my home in a re- 
sponsible capacity, and I am by no means 
sure that I have the critical faculty. I am 
afraid that I should make mistakes and dis- 
appoint every one. I should necessarily 
seem inadequate to occupy a place that has 
been brilliantly filled by so gifted a woman 
as Mrs. Dodge.” Thus I represented my 
disqualifications. 


NEW ADJUSTMENTS 


253 


Each of my objections was in turn over- 
ruled by my friend who persistently and 
perseveringly expressed his wish that at 
least I should give the opportunity a trial. 
Before the evening was over I consented to 
do this, and a fortnight afterwards I was in- 
stalled at my desk in a back room on the 
fourth floor of the building tenanted by the 
Orange Judd Company. We had no eleva- 
tor. I went to the office four days a week 
and learned to mount with confidence the 
stairs I had timidly ascended a year 
earlier. 

To this period belong some of my pleasant 
reminiscences, although they are not of a 
kind to be set down in print. I found it, 
for example, very gratifying to have the 
sense of power that accompanies responsi- 
bility when one is engaged in catering to 
the reading public. To act as hostess in my 
cozy little den was as delightful as to exer- 
cise kindred functions in the home drawing- 
room. There were regular contributors who 
came often, there were men and women who 
dropped in to make suggestions and advance 
ideas or theories, there were artists appear- 
ing with sketches and from day to day there 
was the interest of something perpetually 


254 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


new. The editor who falls into a rut and is 
the slave of routine must inevitably spread 
a flavourless table for his readers. The 
constant demand is twofold. First for 
novelty, bringing in the element of sur- 
prise and variety, and second, for the 
homely and familiar, for that which has its 
parallel in the life and experience of those 
who partake of the feast. The metaphor is 
not strained that brings into comparison a 
weekly or monthly periodical intended for 
the family, and the board at which the 
family sit to partake of nourishing food. 

Mr. Eggleston was a good comrade and an 
admirable chief. He knew what he wanted 
and he knew as well what his subscribers 
were seeking. For a while Mr. E. S. Nadal 
was in the position of assistant editor, writ- 
ing paragraphs, reading and criticising man- 
uscripts and performing the almost innumer- 
able small duties that happen along in a 
journalistic day. Some months after my 
connection with Hearth and Home had been 
fairly established, Mr. Nadal retired from 
the magazine and accepted a position else- 
where. I, having by this time grown fear- 
less enough to attempt anything that was 
offered, slipped into his vacant place and 


NEW ADJUSTMENTS 


255 


carried on its obligations with those of the 
Children’s Page. To my original four days 
a week I added two more and found each 
hour overflowing with things to be done. 
For the time I had become a woman of busi- 
ness with business cares and anxieties. 

During this period I might easily, had I 
chosen, have exchanged journalism for an- 
other not less important and quite as exact- 
ing profession. Three times in as many 
years I was invited to become the Dean of 
an institution for women, once in Illinois, 
once in Pennsylvania and once in New 
York. Each of the institutions that so hon- 
oured me was in the front rank among schools 
of learning for the daughters of the land. I 
had put my hand to the plough in another 
direction and thought it wise to make no 
radical change. I had not yet made a be- 
ginning in what has been the most congenial 
work of many years, namely, writing es- 
pecially for and directly to young women, 
but these suggestions floating in from differ- 
ent quarters without solicitation and with- 
out personal influence led me to think that 
I might have a mission to girlhood. If for 
the years of one generation I have been able 
to write for girls in a friendly, sympathetic 


256 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


fashion, and if it is my proudest distinction 
that they call me their friend, telling me 
their secrets and consulting me about their 
plans, the work I am doing for them dates 
to the hour when I regretfully declined to 
become a preceptress. 

Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, whose best me- 
morial is St. Nicholas , and who is enshrined 
in the hearts of children from Maine to 
California, is no longer with us. When I 
met her for the first time she was in the 
glow of youthful womanhood. Charming, 
magnetic, sympathetic and wholesome, she 
impressed her gracious personality on her 
ideal magazine for the girls and boys of 
America. When I last conversed with her 
in her summer home at Onteora in the Cats- 
kills, she was still beautiful and gracious 
though her hair was gray and her grandchil- 
dren were about her. She had parted with 
none of her enthusiasm, her wit was as ready 
and her fun as spontaneous as in the past, 
and the Indian summer of life shed around 
her an exquisite serenity. She is one of the 
dear women whose friendship suffused an at- 
mosphere of gladness around those whose 
privilege it was to know her well. She 
never grew old. To the day when she fell 


NEW ADJUSTMENTS 


257 


asleep she had a heart responsive to the 
needs of the children, the sweet and trustful 
heart of the child being hers in every vicis- 
situde. • 


XX 

THE DAY’S WORK 

R EMAINING with Hearth and Home 
until it ceased to be published I 
gained a great deal of valuable ex- 
perience and made some lasting friend- 
ships. The question is often asked whether 
it is practicable for a woman to unite pro- 
fessional activity outside its doors with the 
care and management of a household and 
the guardianship of children. I would not 
assert that the combination is ideal, but with 
me it proved successful and the home rou- 
tine was tranquilly ordered and carried on 
without friction, although for several years I 
spent many daylight hours in an office. 

Here let me put on record the obligation 
I owe to a series of worthy and efficient 
maids who proved to be helpers in the 
largest meaning of the term, from the mo- 
ment they stepped into my kitchen until 
each in turn left it for a home of her own. 
One fair-haired girl came from Nova Scotia 
and might have been the heroine of a roman- 
tic novel. She was of good birth and had 
258 



From a Photograph taken in 1880. 




THE DAY’S WORK 


259 


relatives who were commissioned officers in 
the British army. Her father was appar- 
ently the black sheep of his family, and she 
was the eldest of numerous children. She 
devoted her leisure to writing letters of ex- 
traordinary length and her wages were regu- 
larly sent home to aid in the education 
of her younger brothers. This blue-eyed 
maiden had a habit of reading aloud in the 
evening, and the sound of her voice in a 
pleasant monotone with a rising inflection 
at the end of a sentence would reach us 
above stairs like a lulling melody. She was 
married from my home and has had a life 
of usefulness and prosperity. 

Others of whom I think with affectionate 
gratitude were warm-hearted, quick-tem- 
pered and capable daughters of the Emerald 
Isle. They were usually of the Roman 
Catholic faith, though occasionally one was 
a Presbyterian or a Methodist. Whatever 
their creed they belonged to the sisterhood 
who love and serve the world’s Redeemer. 
Lacking their aid I could not have given to 
my work the attention and absorption that 
it demanded. 

In 1880 it had grown to be the definite oc- 
cupation of my time, exacting a large meas- 


260 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ure of thought and claiming constant atten- 
tion. Although every hour was full, I was 
fortunate in being able to do the day’s work 
in my sunny study at home. The Family 
Page in the Christian Intelligencer , which I 
still edit, came into my hands about this 
time, and while engaged in other work for 
various periodicals I now took upon myself 
the responsibility of reading manuscript as 
literary adviser in the book publishing de- 
partment of Messrs. Harper and Brothers. 
When Harper's Young People was estab- 
lished it was natural for me to become one 
of its frequent contributors, and after a 
while there floated into my hands a charm- 
ing and interesting employment which 
brought me into direct contact with thou- 
sands of children. Certain pages in the 
little magazine were set aside for the post- 
mistress, and into her post-office box came 
day by day letters from the boys and girls 
who corresponded with her as confidentially 
as older people have corresponded since. 
I could not step into a ferry-boat or a 
train without meeting children who ap- 
proached me with smiling faces and little 
hands outstretched, saying that they had 
seen my picture in Harper's Young People 



THE CHILDREN’S FRIEND 

Harper’s Young People, 1887 



THE DAY’S WORK 


261 


and knew me as their friend. We organized 
the children into a league of Little Knights 
and Ladies, who really did an immense 
amount of practical good by their self-denial 
and sweet charities. They endowed a bed in 
a hospital for children in New York and 
built in North Carolina a little church for 
the children of the mountains. 

In those days I did all my writing with 
my own hand and I marvel at the number 
of letters I was able to send from my desk 
in a day. To write verses for the children 
was a great pleasure, and nothing that I 
have ever done has seemed to me more en- 
tirely worth while. Attending Thanksgiv- 
ing exercises of a school in my neighbourhood 
a year ago, what was my surprise to hear 
one young voice after another recite from 
the platform poems of mine written years 
ago for Harper’s Young People. At first I 
did not realize whence the familiar stanzas 
had been taken, but one does not readily for- 
get the children of one’s brain. I was the 
happier that this programme had not been ar- 
ranged for me, but was simply the choice of 
the teachers and pupils who had found bits 
that suited the occasion in books that bore 
my name. As typical of the verses written 


262 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


for children two little poems are here in- 
serted. The motive of the first is evident in 
the opening stanza. 

A merry tramp of little feet, 

Just hear the sweet vibration ; 

The children over all the land 
Have had a long vacation, 

And back again they haste to take 
In school the dear old places, 

To measure out the days by rule, 

With fair, unshadowed faces. 

They troop along the city streets, 

Grave eyes grow young that see them, 

And wistful hearts from every blight 
Of sin and pain would free them. 

Athwart the dusty ways of ’ change, 

With wafts of flowers and grasses, 

As if to music sweet and strange, 

The brilliant army passes. 

Along the quiet country roads, 

By purple astors bordered, 

At nine o’clock and half-past three, 

The gay reviews are ordered ; 

And childish voices, clear and shrill, 

Amaze the peeping thrushes, 

And other little feathered folk, 

Housekeeping in the bushes. 

We older people like to watch 
Our little lads and lasses, 

As sturdily they set to work 
In sober ranks and classes ; 

Such happy brows are overbent 
To con the pictured pages, 

Such earnest wills are wrestling with 
The story of the ages. 


THE DAY’S WORK 


263 


And sometimes sighing as we gaze — 

So fast the bairns are growing — 

We think of darker skies to come 
For these, so glad and glowing. 

Fain would we keep the children still 
Brown-cheeked and blithe and ruddy, 

With nothing harder in their lives 
Than days of task and study. 

But God, our Father’s wiser love, 

Prepares them for the evil ; 

This army yet shall wage the war 
With world and flesh and devil. 

God bless them in the coming years, 

And guard the waiting places 
Which, by and by, He’ll bid them fill — 

His smile upon their faces. 

The incident that gave me the next poem 
is a picture in memory still. I was strolling 
along a street in St. Augustine idly noting 
the passers-by when a boy of ten attracted 
my notice. He was lame and his face indi- 
cated suffering. As I glanced at him in 
sympathy he smiled bravely and spoke ab- 
ruptly as if to prevent me from offering him 
pity. 

Tap, tap, along the pavement, tap, 

It came, a little crutch. 

A pale-faced lad looked up at me ; 

“ I do not mind it much,” 

He answered to my pitying look. 

“ It might be worse, you know ; 

Some fellows have to stay in bed, 

When I quite fast can go. 


264 : 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


“Oh, yes ; I used to run about — 

Perhaps I may again ; 

The doctor says His wonderful 
I have so little pain. 

It hurts me now and then, of course— 

Well, ever since the fall ; 

But I’m so very glad, you see, 

That I can walk at all.” 

Tap, tap, the little crutch went on j 
I saw the golden hair, 

The brown eyes wide and all aglow, 

The noble, manly air ; 

And somehow tears a moment came, 

And made my vision dim, 

While still the laddie’s cheerful words 
Were sweet as sweetest hymn. 

“I am so very glad, you see, 

That I can walk at all.” 

Why, that’s the way for us to feel 
Whatever griefs befall. 

I learned a lesson from the boy, 

Who bore with knightly grace, 

The pain that could not drive the smiles 
From his heroic face. 

The delight of working for children ex- 
ceeds the fatigue that must accompany any 
task carried forward day in and day out. 
Children are responsive and appreciative, 
and there is satisfaction in the knowledge 
that the impressions made upon them in 
their formative years are shaping character 
and influencing destiny. The teacher in the 
kindergarten has a post as responsible and 


THE DAY’S WORK 


265 


as honourable as that of the professor before 
whom assemble undergraduates in college. 
What one does for older people may or may 
not fulfill its mission. The earnest worker 
for children never incurs failure. 

Friends have inquired whether it has been 
my custom to wait upon moods and trust to 
inspiration. On the contrary, mine has been 
the task of the day-labourer, and I have 
welcomed drudgery. Granting that the writ- 
ing talent is a native endowment, there must 
yet be industry and perseverance if it is to 
accrue to the profit of its possessor. Person- 
ally I am persuaded that an ordinary day 
spent at an author’s desk may prove as 
fatiguing to soul and body as a day spent in 
the laundry over the tubs. Work is work 
let it be of the brain or of the hand, and if 
it be done faithfully the wage is of secondary 
importance. 

Rudyard Kipling with the unerring touch 
of genius sets the situation before us in 
“L’Envoi,” for which of us does not look 
forward to an hour 

When only the Master shall praise ns, and only the 
Master shall blame, 

And no one shall work for money, and no one shall 
work for fame, 

But each for the joy of the working. 


266 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Women at home desiring to earn money 
that they may not be reduced to begging it 
from reluctant husbands, women aware of a 
wish to express sentiments and opinions in 
print, and women in urgent need of daily 
bread are turning their eyes towards pub- 
lishing houses. They are deeply disap- 
pointed when their offerings are declined 
with thanks. The majority of amateur con- 
tributors have no real equipment. They 
bring to the work they seek no adequate 
preparation. They would not risk a new 
gown in the hands of a third-rate dress- 
maker, nor expect an ignorant peasant to 
cook and serve a dainty meal. Their mis- 
take lies in imagining that neither skill nor 
training is essential to success in writing 
for the press. They likewise leave wholly 
out of the question the fitness that inheres 
in temperament and inborn talent. Thus 
attempting an entrance on a profession 
where the competition is tremendous, they 
are doomed to failure. One such applicant 
observed to me with ingenuous frankness, “ I 
presume you reel off what you write just as 
you would unwind a spool of silk.” 

Another who called on me one summer 
morning told me that she had left her home 


THE DAY’S WORK 


267 


in the West to support herself by newspaper 
work in New York. She knew nothing 
whatever about journalism, and came to me 
that I might explain its principles and give 
her an idea of what she ought to say when 
applying for a position. She stated the situ- 
ation as it appeared inviting to her, in a 
single sentence, — “ I want to find the least 
work and the largest pay.” In this spirit 
she had travelled over many states to meet 
predestined defeat. 

Creative genius is a divinely bestowed gift 
which is the coronation of the few. I do 
not agree with the dictum that genius is 
only a capacity for taking pains. Here and 
there along the ages a magnificent genius 
rises like a mountain peak. It may well be 
that the law of incessant application and 
unstinted endeavour, imperative in its en- 
forcements upon the multitude, has excep- 
tions for these fortunate ones. The truth is 
that genius itself attains to higher eminence 
when allied to robust and sturdy effort than 
when it follows impulse and works heed- 
lessly and at haphazard. 


XXI 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 

M ARY LOUISE BOOTH, for twenty- 
two years the editor of Harper's 
Bazar , was a woman of strong 
character and interesting personality. My 
first meeting with her took place when I 
was fifteen. She appeared one morning, a 
young woman nearly ten years our senior, 
in a class taught by our French professor. 
Presented as an outside student who desired 
an opportunity for French conversation, we 
found her a stimulating addition to our 
number. Miss Booth was then diffident and 
retiring, although thoroughly self-possessed 
and able to hold her own in a discussion, 
however obstinate the opposite side might 
be. Her accent was good, and she was 
already familiar with the best in French 
literature. 

Years passed on swiftly and I had forgot- 
ten my former occasional classmate, when I 
discovered her again in the writer of letters 
from the editorial rooms of Messrs. Harper 
268 



From a Photograph taken in 1890. 






































































































































































































































































































THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


269 


and Brothers. Our acquaintance for a long 
time was slight, but it finally matured into 
friendship. Miss Booth combined gracious- 
ness and dignity in a singular degree, and 
behind her feminine reserve she hid a mas- 
culine grasp of business and the quick 
decisiveness of a man of affairs. Never in 
the least mannish, and womanly to the 
core, she excelled most of her sex in quali- 
ties more often appertaining to man than to 
woman. 

During her protracted connection with 
the Bazar she took few vacations of any 
length. Once she went to Europe for six 
months, but ordinarily four weeks in sum- 
mer covered her annual holiday. She once 
amused me by saying that she had gone 
twelve summers in succession to a place for 
which she did not especially care because at 
the inn there was a veranda to which she 
could easily step from a carriage. The slim 
girl who came to the classes of our French 
professor had vanished, and in later years 
there was little trace of her in the woman 
whose avoirdupois was somewhat impress- 
ive. 

Miss Booth edited Harper’s Bazar so suc- 
cessfully that it was a welcome visitor in 


270 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


homes of refinement from coast to coast. 
While preeminently a journal of fashion it 
had a pervasive literary flavour from the 
first to the last page. She was ably sup- 
ported in the fashion columns of the Bazar 
by a tactful and efficient assistant, Miss S. 
G. Shanks. Of her I shall speak a little 
farther on. 

Alice and Phoebe Cary, two gifted sisters 
from Ohio, both of whom were poets of no 
mean degree, had drawn around them in 
their home a brilliant coterie of friends, 
some of them literary, others artistic, all 
companionable and socially delightful. 
When death had taken these beloved 
women away there seemed left no rallying 
centre to which the scattered groups might 
come. 

Miss Booth, who had united with a con- 
genial friend, almost dearer than a sister, in 
establishing a home which lacked no ele- 
ment of beauty, resolved to entertain the peo- 
ple she liked, informally and cordially, every 
Saturday evening. The house in which Miss 
Booth and her friend, Mrs. Wright, resided, 
and which is gratefully remembered by those 
who were wont to assemble there, is not now 
in existence. New York is a city of rapid 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


271 


growth and swift transitions, and it is by no 
means a strange thing that as commerce de- 
mands, the faces of streets and avenues are 
altered beyond recognition. Neither Miss 
Booth nor Mrs. Wright dreamed that only a 
little while after they had gone not one stone 
should be left upon another to show where 
their home had been. They were inseparable 
in life, these two women whose friendship 
was perfect, and in death they were not long 
divided, Mrs. Wright surviving Miss Booth 
little more than a year. 

Miss Booth’s Saturday evenings were 
unique. Of material refreshment there was 
seldom anything except tea and wafers, and 
this was itself an innovation in days when 
custom exacted a spread of some elaboration 
to express hospitality. Miss Booth had the 
honour of acting as a pioneer in a direction 
for the better. Clever men and attractive 
women met beneath her roof, the talk was 
witty, discursive and keen, and her draw- 
ing-room compared favourably with a salon in 
Paris under the old regime. Miss Booth’s 
illness and death brought sadness to a large 
circle, and to those who had loved her the 
loss seemed irreparable. A few days after- 
her death, at the instance of the old house of 


272 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Messrs. Harper and Brothers, I was installed 
as her successor. 

The Harper building in Franklin Square 
was much like a beehive in its orderly in- 
dustry. The offices of the Bazar , Weekly and 

- Magazine , were reached by an ascent of steps 
that wound through the centre of the edifice. 
Every one who chose to call had free access 
to the editors. No particular care was taken 
to guard any one from intrusion and, to say 
the truth, the general editorial force took no 
pains for its own protection. 

-Mr. Henry M. Alden, the benignant editor 
of the magazine, was accessible at any hour 
of any day to whomsoever it might occur to 
call on him with a suggestion, a story or a 
sketch. In his rare combination of the mys- 
tic and the practical man, a combination that 
has made Mr. Alden the dean of American 
editors, he was never annoyed by a visitor, 
and never permitted a caller to fancy an ar- 
rival inopportune. The same thing could be 

- said of the late Mr. S. S. Conant, at that time 
the editor of Harper's Weekly , and of Mr. R. 
R. Sinclair, who was Mr. Conant’s chief of 
staff. George William Curtis appeared on 
certain days and brought with him in person 
the atmosphere that for many years made 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


273 


the Easy Chair the most magnetic corner of 
Harper’s Magazine . How well I remember 
the homeliness, friendliness and old-fashioned 
sweetness of that publishing house a genera- 
tion ago. 

The members of the firm as it then existed 
have been compared to the Cheeryble broth- 
ers in “Nicholas Nickleby.” No guard on - 
picket duty fenced these gentlemen from in- 
trusion. As the visitor climbed the wide 
flight of steps from the sidewalk to the count- 
ing-room, he turned to the right at the top, 
took a step or two and there behind a railing 
in full view, each occupied at his own desk, 
sat the several men who bore the name of 
Harper. Four brothers had founded the 
house, and their pictures framed together 
adorned the wall of the Bazar office. Their 
sons and grandsons bore a strong resemblance 
to this honoured quartette, and the resem- 
blance was not in externals only. The look 
of honesty and sincerity, of kindness and 
goodness that characterized the countenances 
of the original four, distinguished the faces 
and the bearing of their descendants. Each 
had his own department, and the stranger 
from South Australia or Nebraska, the ex- 
plorer from Africa or the young author from 


274 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Massachusetts might walk in, introduce him- 
self and be pleasantly greeted by the man with 
whom he desired to have conference. 

In the summer the entire house, from the 
heads of the firm to the errand boy, took off 
its coat in those days. No apology was made 
for shirt sleeves. Also, in summer, one of 
the firm, who, living out of town, possessed 
a magnificent rose garden, would encumber 
himself with a burden of fragrant flowers, and 
send them here and there about the building 
for the pleasure of the workers with homes in 
the city and gardens in back yards. In win- 
ter many an act of unobtrusive kindness 
brightened the lives of those who might have 
been supposed beneath the notice of the au- 
gust heads of a great publishing house. 

The little incident that I now relate was 
told me by a man who worked at a printer’s 
case and happened to know the circumstance. 

On a day when the temperature was below 
zero a messenger boy sent on an errand had 
no overcoat. The lack was observed by one 
of the firm who inquired of another boy why 
the little chap was unprovided with the 
needful garment. “ His father is dead,” was 
the explanation, “ and his mother is very 
poor.” Late that afternoon the little fellow 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


275 


was summoned to a personal interview, and 
approached the special Mr. Harper, who 
called for him, with some trepidation. Had 
he done or not done anything for which he 
must give account ? A key was put in his 
hand. “ I am going home,” said the gentle- 
man. “ Wait a few minutes till the other 
boys have gone, then open that door and in 
the closet you will find a coat that does not fit 
me. Put it on and wear it.” The coat was 
new, and had been purchased on purpose for 
the boy. 

Miss Booth had a little office in which she 
sat by herself, the furniture limited to a 
desk, a small sofa and two chairs. Here she 
could be solitary when she chose, but a 
knock at her door was always answered by a 
pleasant “ Come in.” She had the art of set- 
ting people at their ease. She excelled in a 
more difficult role, that of rejecting manu- 
scripts without wounding the sensitiveness 
of disappointed contributors. I am sure 
that Miss Booth never possessed a type- 
writer, nor asked the aid of a stenographer. 
The typewriter and the telephone were intro- 
duced in my day. 

To depict even faintly the hesitation I felt- 
in undertaking the duties incumbent on this 


276 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


editorship is impossible. Harper's Bazar 
was preeminently a journal of fashion. 
With its other departments I was familiar. 
In these I was assured that I might use my 
own discretion and introduce such changes 
as I deemed advisable. In the realm of 
fashion the policy of presenting the newest 
styles at the earliest moment and of illu- 
minating them by descriptive articles equally 
helpful and suggestive to the professional 
dressmaker and the plain woman at home, 
must continue unaltered. This policy could 
not be modified without the sacrifice of fea- 
tures that had made the Bazar popular and 
had kept it in advance of its competitors. 

The Bazar had an individual field. This 
it had occupied with ease and distinction. 
It could not be suffered to fall below the 
standard it had hitherto maintained. The 
new editor felt herself at a loss because she 
had never cared very much about dress, had 
been indifferent to gowns and hats so long as 
they were good of their kind, and had 
habitually minimized time spent in the pre- 
cincts of milliners and dressmakers. This 
disability was overruled, when it was candidly 
set before Mr. J. Henry Harper, by the as- 
surance that Miss Shanks had for years 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


277 


taken charge of the fashion descriptions, 
while the fashion drawings imported from 
abroad were in competent hands that could 
be implicitly trusted. 

As whatever one does with a will is sure 
to become fascinating, and as difficulties van- 
ish from the path of the person who is de- 
termined to surmount them, it required less 
time than I had feared for my handling the 
fashions with discrimination and enjoyment. 
In the initiative I owed success, such as it 
was, to the dark-eyed, graceful, low-voiced 
Southern woman who threw into her weekly 
task the force of a rare equipment. When- 
ever this gentlewoman went in search of in- 
formation on the topics that were exclusively 
hers, she was received with the utmost 
courtesy. Her exquisite manners and ex- 
treme conscientiousness were passports every- 
where, and guarded doors flew open at her 
touch. If she wrote about a child’s frock, a 
bride’s wedding gown, or the costume of an 
elderly lady, the paragraph made invariably 
the impression that upon the writing she 
had bestowed care and thought. More than 
once I have heard her say, “ These subjects of 
mine are limited in their scope, but they 
concern women, and I mean to treat them as 


278 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


well as I possibly can, so that the mother or 
the girl who is making her own clothing may 
do it as successfully as if she left an order 
for her outfit with a house in Paris.” 

Those who knew Miss Shanks best hon- 
oured her the more because she had waged 
an almost lifelong battle with physical weak- 
ness. She had not passed her first youth 
when her physician told her that her single 
chance for life and health lay in living out- 
of-doors all the time, let the weather be fine 
or inclement. We have become accustomed 
to the rule of outdoor living, to spending 
hours in the open, in rain, fog and snow, and 
to sleeping, if need be, in tents or verandas, 
but the habit was less generally adopted when 
my friend began her brave fight against an 
inherited malady. 

In the last two years of her life the effort 
constantly made to keep pace with the de- 
mands of her work was little short of heroic, 
but she rejected pity, would accept no assist- 
ance and never showed the white feather. 
The last copy that came from her hand to 
the printer was in type on the morning that 
she died. I have spoken of her with the en- 
thusiasm that thrills me when I think of the 
leaders of a forlorn hope. Her nature was 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


279 


essentially womanly, her Christian faith was 
that of a child, she faced death without a 
tremor, yet held him long at bay by her in- 
domitable determination to live. She was 
proud of her birth and upbringing in Ken- 
tucky, and the old state never had a daughter 
who did greater credit to the soil. 

That we were able to fill the vacancy made 
by her decease without an interregnum, and 
to the satisfaction of the subscription list, was 
only another proof that no one is indispensa- 
ble in this world. The world’s work goes on 
with no visible interruption, in spheres, con- 
spicuous or obscure, although the workers 
drop their tasks. 

Addressing a club of young women at Smith 
College by request, on the general subject of 
journalism, it was my privilege to tell them 
that no vocation alluring to women possessed 
wider opportunities and richer rewards than 
this. I was careful to explain that the op- 
portunities and rewards were frequently not 
those that could be balanced and weighed 
and measured, that they were less of the ma- 
terial than of the spiritual ordering, and that 
they might best be estimated in Tennyson’s 
line, “ Give us the wages of going on.” 

The salaries paid to women in the newspa- 


280 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


per world are liberal if they reach the top, 
and even from the bottom of the ladder the 
feminine worker receiving space rates for her 
assignments is paid as generously as her 
brother or husband. The desk of the editor- 
in-chief, or of an associate who holds a respon- 
sible position of management, focusses so many 
converging interests that it is like any other 
post of authority. The editor has an under- 
stood responsibility to the publishing end, 
is narrowly watched by the advertising peo- 
ple, and has intimate relations with artists 
and writers, with men and women of almost 
universal fame, and with those whose stars 
have not yet risen above the horizon. So far 
from cherishing a disposition of partiality 
towards those who are well known as authors, 
every successful editor is happiest on the dis- 
covery of a new writer. 

It is a red letter day in a publishing house 
when some one absolutely new sends the 
poem, the story, the essay or the romance 
that is to give the reading world surprise and 
delight. To convince the novice or the youth- 
ful aspirant of this fact is very nearly impos- 
sible, yet it is a fact. The editor, therefore, 
discounts a letter of introduction accompa- 
nying the manuscript of an amateur, while 


THE LIFE OF AN EDITOR 


281 


he or she relying on trained judgment and 
experience arrives at conclusions based on the 
manuscript itself. Thus a book that later 
reached more than one hundred thousand 
readers, one day drifted into a publishing 
house out of space, its author entirely un- 
known and its shape not attractive at the 
first glance. The editor to whom it was sub- 
mitted carried it home for perusal and could 
not lay it down until long past midnight. 
Whoever can write in this enthralling man- 
ner will sooner or later receive the pleasure 
of acceptance. Perhaps acceptance may be 
delayed. 

The author who really has a message, who 
has something to say and knows how to say 
it, need not be discouraged by a half-dozen 
successive rejections. The little printed slip 
that excites so much indignation in the minds 
of those to whom it is sent tells the simple 
truth in its statement that manuscripts are 
not declined solely on account of demerit on 
their part. The editor may already have his 
shelves overstocked, or the wares offered may 
not suit his peculiar public. Once in a while, 
as I have said, a manuscript arrives that is so 
strong and so compelling that the editor can- 
not afford to refuse it. 


282 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Be it understood that the editor’s largest 
obligation is to the people who read the 
magazine and who are at the other end, so to 
speak, of his telephone. If he can hear their 
voices, get their responses, and know that 
week by week, month by month, year by 
year, he is furnishing what they want, his 
highest ambition is satisfied. A much larger 
number of men than of women are engaged 
in journalism. 

It is noteworthy that the magazines in- 
tended for home reading, and presumably 
read by women to a greater extent than by 
men, are at present edited and engineered by 
men. Concentration, consecration, and tire- 
less energy are required of man or woman in 
an editorial chair. As the physician feels the 
pulse of a patient, the editor feels the pulse 
of his audience. A magazine leaves the press 
and is swiftly borne, it may be, to the ends 
of the earth. Wherever it goes it appeals to 
individuals. Its mission should be to dissi- 
pate melancholy, soothe pain and relieve 
tedium. Unless it does this it misses its aim, 
and its editor is responsible for its failure and 
is in the position of the commander defeated 
in battle. 


XXII 


PEN PORTRAITS 

A MONG those who never crossed the 
threshold of the office without bring- 
ing a waft of joy to the little staff of 
Harper’s Bazar none stands higher in grateful 
memory than Charles Dudley Warner. His 
manner was invariably genial, his words to 
the point, his air that of an elder brother. 
Mr. Warner’s books are like himself, breezy, 
humorous, virile and sensible. Whenever I 
read them I hear again the cadences of his 
voice and have no trouble in putting the 
accent where it must have been in his 
thought. His keen blue eyes, clear-cut fea- 
tures and patriarchal beard joined with the 
dignity of his presence in making his per- 
sonality impressive. Others might discour- 
age one who was faint of heart and ready to 
look on the dark side. Not so Mr. Warner. 
He had a bluff, cheery, cordial and emphatic 
way of bidding one expect brightness, and 
the anticipation was usually fulfilled for he 
was something of a seer. His death made 
an empty place in many lives. 

283 


284 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


Another Great Heart has only this year 
been taken away from us, Edward Everett 
Hale. He, too, was of the company who 
now and then had errands in Franklin 
Square, and it was his custom on such oc- 
casions to make a passing call on the editor 
of the Bazar . A massive man, tall, with 
broad shoulders that stooped a little, with a 
strong earnest face and a kindly hand-clasp, 
Dr. Hale did not need to pronounce a bene- 
diction since he always left one unworded 
behind him. If I could I would write in 
letters of gold in the room of every girl stu- 
dent, every young man at the beginning of 
his career and in every business office his 
four terse rules for daily living as he gave 
them to us in “ Ten Times One Is Ten.” 
“ Look up and not down, look out and not 
in, look forward and not back, and lend a 
hand.” From the days of his youth to the 
sunset of his venerable age Dr. Hale was 
always lending a hand. He said a gracious 
word to me years before I met him at Har- 
per’s, and it lingered with me like remem- 
bered music. That meeting was half acci- 
dental and occurred in Boston where I had 
gone with a friend to hear Dr. Hale preach. 
There was something rugged, calm and restful 


PEN PORTKAITS 


285 


in Dr. Hale’s look and manner, and only a 
year before his death I had a glimpse of 
these temperamental qualities in reading a 
letter sent by him to a young friend who 
showed it to me. Well did this good man 
represent the stock from which he came, than 
which there is no finer in New England. 

Laurence Hutton was another never-to-be- 
forgotten associate and friend. If ever man 
had a genius for friendship, a secret of at- 
tracting to him people of all sorts and con- 
ditions, that man was Laurence Hutton. His 
bonhomie was as marked as his simplicity 
and candour. His home in West Thirty- 
fourth Street, the house in which he was 
born, was the resort of scholars, poets, crafts- 
men of various guilds and professions, and 
he and his charming wife made its hospi- 
tality as spontaneous as light, as fragrant as 
the breath of a morning in June. Mr. Hutton 
had travelled extensively, and his home was 
almost a museum in the variety of souvenirs 
brought from many lands. In his drawing- 
room one wintry afternoon I met Helen 
Keller, then a child of fifteen, and saw Mark 
Twain impetuously dash the tears from his 
eyes as he looked into her sweet face. She 
could not see and she could not hear, but 


286 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


she knew the instant she crossed the Hutton 
door-sill that she was in the midst of friends. 
She knew, too, that everywhere around her 
there were books, and almost her first obser- 
vation was, “ I have never before been in a 
house where the people had so many books.” 
She was right, Mr. Hutton’s library having 
every apartment for its own. 

Mr. Hutton’s removal to Princeton robbed 
New York of a social attraction, and eclipsed 
the gaiety of those who could not follow 
him to his country abode. With Mr. Warner 
and Dr. Hale he left many to mourn him 
when death took him hence in the meridian 
of his days. 

I have spoken in earlier chapters of George 
Cary Eggleston as I knew him when we both 
were young. Mr. Eggleston is not one to 
grow old, and he is as distinguished a figure 
and as charming a talker now that his hair 
is gray as before Time had taken liberties 
with its earlier hue. 

Two or three little recollections cling about 
my thought of Mr. Howells. One of them 
is that he once showed me, written in a 
minute hand on a sheet of note-paper in 
four short pages, what might be called the 
skeleton of a novel which he was about to 


PEN PORTRAITS 


287 


write, a novel that has been a prime favour- 
ite in the long list of its author’s pro- 
ductions. Another reminiscence is that I 
drank a cup of tea at Mrs. Howells’ table of 
Mr. Howells’ making, where he smilingly de- 
clared that the art of properly making tea 
was too difficult to be mastered by women. 
Certainly the tea was perfect. 

Mrs. Candice Wheeler, author, artist and 
presiding genius of the Society of Decorative 
Art, is another whose spirit of youth has 
been defiant of the inroads of age. About 
Mrs. Wheeler there has always been some- 
thing benignant and queenly. Whether 
one welcomed her into the little office in 
Franklin Square or met her in her home in 
New York or at her lovely cottage at 
Onteora, one felt the grace of a nature deep, 
restrained and pure. Mrs. Wheeler is many 
sided. She has an extraordinary talent for 
organization and a remarkable gift of direc- 
tion. The Woman’s Building in the White 
City at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 was 
the expression of her artistic sense. She has 
poise, serenity and gentleness, and her 
beauty confers a distinction on the rank she 
most prizes, that of grandmother. 

Marion Harland, who scored a triumph as 


288 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


a novel writer before she was twenty and 
who has never ceased performing her daily 
task through the years of her busy and useful 
life, is a woman whom to know is to love 
and honour. A Virginian by birth, she 
loves the Old Dominion, and her manner is 
that of a gracious Southern matron. Her 
pen-name is not more widely known than her 
real name, Mary Virginia Terhune. As the 
wife of the late Rev. Dr. Edward Payson 
Terhune she accepted for more than fifty 
years the multiform responsibilities of a 
pastor’s wife, presiding at one time over an 
infant school and again teaching a Bible class 
of young men. She has published many 
books, and has proved herself the friend of 
thousands of American women, in her incom- 
parable manuals of housekeeping. Here she 
may almost be said to have blazed the path 
of the pioneer. 

I was a guest at her golden wedding little 
thinking then that before many months she 
would be left alone. On the day that Dr. 
Terhune and herself entertained their golden 
wedding guests at their beautiful home in 
Pompton, New Jersey, there was no forebod- 
ing of separation to come before another 
year should roll around. Yet, as in every 


PEN PORTRAITS 


289 


chime of bridal bells when youth mates 
with youth, there is the far-off minor tone 
of a knell, so when golden wedding bells 
ring there must be the hint of a break in 
their melody. 

Mrs. Terhune has been an eloquent plat- 
form speaker, is popular in the Meridian 
Club of which she is an active member, and 
still writes stories for the press in which the 
dramatic element is as marked as it was in 
her earlier days. 

Olive Thorn Miller, who entered upon 
literary work after she had brought up and 
launched her family, is a woman of agree- 
able and straightforward address whom one 
would best describe in a word by the epithet 
motherly. Mrs. Miller is identified in the 
minds of most of her admirers as a woman 
who has studied birds, learned their ways, 
discovered their secrets and written about 
them with infinite charm. During my ten 
years’ connection with Harper's Bazar she 
was one of its most valued contributors, 
writing not only about nature and our little 
brothers of the air, but as well on domestic 
matters and the training of children. 

Ruth McEnery Stewart, winsome, dainty, 
fearless and unsurpassed in delineating 


290 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


Southern life before the war, used to bring 
with her that indescribable air of grace that 
has always been characteristic of the women 
of Louisiana. Mrs. Stewart came to New 
York a stranger, but there was in her mag- 
netism that speedily drew to her a host of 
friends. One of these, Elizabeth Bacon 
Custer, comes to my mind as I mention 
Mrs. Stewart. In the great sorrow that 
befell the latter when she lost her only son 
in the dawn of his young manhood, Mrs. 
Custer remained at her side, strengthening, 
ministering and comforting as only one 
could who had herself drunk deeply of the 
bitter cup of grief. 

General Custer and she were married 
before the Civil War was over. She shared 
his military life, travelling with him, living 
at frontier posts, undergoing cheerfully 
every hardship and enjoying every hour 
until in an instant the joy was turned 
to lamentation. Her “ Boots and Saddles ” 
is the story of her life in tent and field. 
Only those who have known Mrs. Custer in 
the long years of her widowhood since 1876 
can fully appreciate her rare worth, her 
charm for young people and the symmetry 
of a character as strong as it is sweet. 


PEN PORTRAITS 


291 


Mary E. Wilkins, now Mrs. Charles Free- 
man, achieved success in the first story that 
she sent to Franklin Square. The story was 
about two old women who were established 
by kind friends in an Old Ladies’ Home. 
The two dear women ran away from this 
asylum in which they felt forlorn. They 
liked nothing there and preferred the priva- 
tions of the little house to which they were 
accustomed. This story came to my prede- 
cessor, Miss Booth, written in a childish un- 
formed hand, and she thought at the first 
glance that it must have been sent by a 
schoolgirl. When she read it she ex- 
perienced that sense of delight that those 
know who discover a new planet. 

Mary Wilkins had the gift of insight and 
the art of photography. She described the 
quaint characters whom she had known in 
Vermont and Massachusetts precisely as they 
were, and from the beginning her work has 
been greatly appreciated on both sides of the 
Atlantic. How shall I paint her picture? 
She is demure, shy, unobtrusive and often 
silent, but she is silent only because she 
does not choose to speak, for no one can talk 
more delightfully than herself. She reminds 
one of a delicate flower that has bloomed on 


292 


FKOM MY YOUTH UP 


an austere hillside. I am disposed to think 
her ghost stories even better than her stories 
of New England life, but about this there 
may be two opinions. 

There are others whom I might mention, 
but for one reason or another I must desist. 
How shall I sketch without unfairness this 
one or that while omitting another equally 
entitled to a place in this group ? There, for 
instance, is one who came often always bring- 
ing with her something so bright and charm- 
ing that the little girl at the typewriter 
would look up with a smile and say after she 
had gone that she lighted up the room 
though the day were dark and rainy. 

There was a lady well on in years whom I 
associate with a black silk bag from the 
depths of which she extracted, week after 
week, manuscripts of interminable length 
and impossible availability. I used to see 
her enter and my heart would sink, for it 
was never easy to bear the disappointment in 
her countenance when her offerings were 
found unsuitable. Nothing daunted, she al- 
ways came again. 

Then, too, there was the perennial poet, 
threadbare and poverty-stricken, whose 
verses did not pass muster, but who had the 


PEN PORTRAITS 293 

buoyancy of a cork and an amount of self- 
confidence that sent him away compassiona- 
ting the dullness of an editor who did not 
recognize his genius: Poets there were 
whose work fills an honourable place in 
American literature, humourists who con- 
tributed to the fun of the nation and lovely 
young girls full of plans, intending to do 
great things. Some of these have reached 
their goal ; others, it may be, have attained to 
something better in the sanctity of domestic 
life. 


XXIII 


AS MOTHER CONFESSOR 

“ T^\ Y what witchery do you understand 
girls ? ” inquired a friend. “ To 
me,” she added, “ they are the most 
puzzling of human beings.” If I understand 
girls and they are good enough to treat me 
as though I do, I have no secret except the 
open one that I love them. Girlhood is to 
me so winsome, so beautiful and so full of 
possibilities for the future that I regard with 
profound thankfulness the confidence I re- 
ceive from girls in their teens and twenties, 
and would rather lose everything else that 
life has brought me than part with their 
esteem. 

To be frank, it is not to girlhood alone 
that I have held the post of mother confessor 
in the last decade. Although my correspond- 
ence with my countrywomen dates back- 
ward thirty years, it is during the last ten 
that it has been most extensive, most per- 
sonal and most intimate. Mothers write to 
294 



On the Verandah, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, 1905. 




AS MOTHER CONFESSOR 


295 


me with a freedom and candour that they 
would find impossible if they met me face 
to face. The barrier of distance makes 
revelation easy, particularly when those who 
write to me are aware that their communica- 
tions will be held inviolate. 

My letters are not limited as to substance 
and length by the detail that my correspond- 
ents do not personally know me. A closely 
written epistle covering twenty-four pages of 
note-paper is not an uncommon incident in 
the morning mail. Letters arrive from 
bachelors weary of their solitude, from fathers 
disturbed over the conduct of children, and 
from baffled swains uncertain how to inter- 
pret the behaviour of the adorable one who 
holds them aloof while yet they linger al- 
lured to the dear presence like the moth to 
the candle. 

The position of adviser in general, of 
mentor to invisible friends, and of arbiter in 
disputes has its aspect of privilege, but is 
not without serious responsibility. The tax 
on sympathy is incessant, all the more that 
in cases manifold sympathy seems inadequate 
to the occasion. Yet the pleasures of the 
situation outnumber the pains. Glimpses of 
heroic lives often give me a new idea of the 


296 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


fortitude and courage of plain people who 
sound no trumpet before them though the 
Recording Angel writes “ Well done ” beside 
their names at the close of every toiling day. 

Glimpses of an opposite character are, 
alas, not infrequent. When, for instance, a 
young woman confides to me that she is so 
disillusionized by her struggle with limited 
means, and so weary of the care of her child 
that she has decided to send the latter to her 
mother-in-law and leave her husband to 
shift for himself as best he can, in order 
that she may snatch again her lost freedom, 
I am reconvinced that all rules have excep- 
tions. This woman, frankly stating that she 
craves rich dress, roses and admiration, that 
she wants horses to ride and the chance to 
travel and see the world, has unfortunately 
become obsessed by a longing for the stage. 
She fancies that she has dramatic ability 
and is sure that if her fetters were dropped 
she would soon arrive at eminence as a 
singer or an actress. Seeing with the ut- 
most clearness that she is simply morbid 
and selfish, reading between the lines that 
her heart has not awakened at the call of 
wifehood and maternity to the sacredness of 
either, I try as best I may to win her away 


AS MOTHER CONFESSOR 


297 


from the tempter, and impress her with the 
loneliness and disappointment that must be 
her portion if she persist in deserting her 
home. 

“ I am the last of my family at home,” 
writes a ranchman of the Southwest. “ I 
have wide acres and plenty of money, but 
the place is lonely and will be lonelier yet 
in years that are coming. My brothers and 
sisters are married and settled in different 
localities in their own homes, but my father 
and mother are with me. So long as they 
live I do not wish to ask any woman to be- 
come my wife. In the nature of things a 
day will dawn when I must sit by a desolate 
hearth, and yet at the present time I can do 
no woman the injustice of courting her 
when I can offer only an indefinite engage- 
ment. While my mother lives, no daughter- 
in-law will be welcomed here. I have so 
long remained steadfast in my relation to 
the dear old people that the whole family 
accept the sacrifice of my life as natural, and 
they do not see that it involves self-denial 
for me. Now tell me what to do.” 

Here is a problem not easy of solution. 
Undoubtedly this man who has proved him- 
self a devoted son would make for the 


298 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


woman he could love a good husband, and 
the right woman would willingly wait for 
him. But where shall he go to find her? 
Holding old-fashioned ideas of love and 
sentiment, and believing as well in propin- 
quity as a helpful adjunct in affairs matri- 
monial, I perceive that his wide acres and 
his aged parents are united in prolonging 
his compulsory bachelorhood. Yet I sug- 
gest invitations to nephews and nieces, 
journeys away from home, more confidence 
in himself and a possible injustice to the old 
mother who might not be hostile to the 
coming of the right daughter, if only she 
could be found. I remind him that time is 
flying and that vacillation and postpone- 
ment can in his case have but one result, 
that of leaving him isolated to no purpose. 

My patience is much more tried when I 
read another letter, this, too, from a ranch- 
man, who sends an inventory of his cattle 
and speaks slightingly of the young women 
in his neighbourhood. He would like to 
marry, but has no time for courting. “I 
am too busy,” he says, “ in building my 
fortune and laying its foundations deeply 
and strongly, to waste my time in getting 
acquainted with pretty girls. There are 


AS MOTHER CONFESSOR 299 

those of my own class in the country from 
which I came, and when I become a million- 
aire I will cross the ocean again and look 
for one of them.” 

I read the letter once or twice to be sure 
that it is written in good faith, and conclud- 
ing that it is I answer this mistaken 
money-grubber that by the time he has 
amassed the gold he seeks, youth, health 
and strength may be laid waste and he will 
look back over years that the locust has 
eaten. 

The every-day trials and perplexities of 
young girls are more interesting and less 
disheartening than the confidences of their 
elders. A girl stands at the parting of the 
ways, she is uncertain of herself, not sure of 
her own powers, anxious to make the most 
of her opportunities and deeply impressed 
by a sense of duty. The girl who has been 
liberally educated is not so often ambitious 
for a career as desirous to help her parents 
and do something for the age in which 
she lives. Fifty years ago it was taken for 
granted that marriage was the goal of every 
young woman’s inmost thought, and the 
aim for her of her father and mother. 
While it is everlastingly true that home is 


300 


FKOM MY YOUTH UP 


woman’s kingdom, and that she who is hap- 
pily married reaches a divine reality of 
blessedness surpassing that of her mateless 
sister, still single women are not objects of 
pity. There are numberless avenues for 
their occupation, and a girl with ordinary 
gifts has but to choose that employment for 
which she is best fitted. 

A girl writes that she has been teaching a 
district school for several years, and that she 
may continue teaching at her discretion. 
She gives satisfaction to her school board, 
and like Cornelia Blimber, has no trouble in 
bringing the children on. But she has no 
wish to spend her life in pedagogy, and 
more and more the schoolroom is becoming 
in her view an imprisoning cell. 

Here I know precisely what to say. No 
one should teach who is not in love with 
teaching, and no one can do the best work 
for children if her attitude to them is one 
of weariness and distaste. I am able to 
suggest other avocations to a young woman 
thus situated, and fortunately I can tell 
her of instances within my own knowledge 
where the woman, who found teaching an 
unprofitable drudgery, has made a brilliant 
record in business. I bid her burn her 


AS MOTHER CONFESSOR 


301 


ships, look for something to do and when 
found I urge her to throw into the new em- 
ployment all the energy and purpose that is 
in her. I counsel her not to be discouraged 
if success comes slowly at first. Whoever 
would succeed must persevere. The advice 
is trite, but it needs to be repeated over and 
over in one or another form, and if followed 
it bears good fruit. 

The girl who thinks she can write turns 
to me day after day, and for that matter so 
do her mother and her maiden aunt. I 
have made it my rule to write to each 
literary aspirant with as much encourage- 
ment as honesty permits me to give. I do 
not conceal the probability of delay and dis- 
appointment in nine out of ten who are 
choosing literature as their profession, but I 
am always hopeful that the tenth corre- 
spondent may be the one before whom 
stretches a rosy future. 

To the girl, and her name is Legion, who 
is in love and does not know it, who is 
afraid of Love, distrustful of herself and re- 
luctant to be bound, clinging to her freedom 
as a bird to its wings, three-fourths of my 
letters are addressed. Poor child ! She has 
had so little experience in the hard school 


302 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


of life, she so often makes mistakes, and she 
so frequently regrets both her decisions and 
her indecisions that to her my whole heart 
goes out. As her mother confessor I tell her 
not to be in haste, not to suffer herself to be 
too much influenced by the wishes of out- 
siders, though they happen to be her next of 
kin, and not to permit a sordid motive to 
degrade what should be the sacred engage- 
ment of an entire life. 

When a girl writes to me that she has 
broken her troth-plight because she was con- 
vinced that she did not love the one to 
whom it was given, while in the back of her 
mind it is evident that she thought her 
suitor would not accept his release, I am 
sorry for her situation. Full well I know 
what is coming next. The man who seemed 
to worship her has gone his way, and now 
he is paying his devoirs at another’s shrine. 
How shall she win him back? He is not 
again to be captured, and she cannot with 
dignity make an attempt at his reallure- 
ment. 

The puzzles of which girls tell me in this 
and other directions resemble the swift 
changes of a kaleidoscope. All that I can 
do is to persuade them of the necessity to 


AS MOTHER CONFESSOR 


303 


disdain pettiness, to abate no jot of womanly 
grace, and in every circumstance of life to be 
true to the highest ideal of womanhood. 

Admitted as I daily am into households 
that I shall never see in the flesh, knowing 
the names of the children, invited to sit be- 
side the couch of pain, allowed to comfort 
the mother whose world is shadowed by 
bereavement, offering consolation to those 
who tarry in the house of mourning, and 
sharing the gladness of those who step buoy- 
antly into the house of feasting, I lift my 
eyes in thankfulness to the Father above. 
It is worth while to have lived, worth while 
to have been busy, and worth while to have 
reached my present milestone. A queen 
upon her throne could not be happier than I 
in my capacity of mother confessor. 


XXIV 

AN IDEAL BIBLE CLASS 

I FANCY that if the professor of Greek 
or Mathematics in a university were 
asked which of his many classes he had 
found ideal, he would be puzzled to give a 
reply. “ Every class,” the professor would 
say, “ has had its quota of fairly conscientious 
students, its two or three who learned with- 
out apparent effort, its plodders who toiled 
for all they gained, and its dunces who never 
succeeded in passing an examination.” The 
professor would shake his head and laugh- 
ingly declare that by a strange paradox his 
classes had all been ideal, while none of 
them deserved the designation. 

I taught my first Sunday-school class be- 
fore I was sixteen. Year in and year out 
until a very recent period I have been a 
Sunday-school teacher, and unlike the pro- 
fessor I have no difficulty in deciding which 
among many classes was my ideal of what a 
Bible class should be. The class was mine 
for ten consecutive years. It numbered never 
304 


AN IDEAL BIBLE CLASS 


305 


less than thirty and seldom more than fifty 
young women. Of these the youngest was 
in her later teens and the eldest in her early 
thirties. We had a room entirely to our- 
selves during a large part of our beautiful 
time together. For a reason that escapes me, 
probably because the room was needed to 
accommodate a rapidly-growing school, we 
were compelled during my final three years 
to assemble in the gallery of the church 
where the pews were square and were fur- 
nished with chairs. In this we missed some- 
thing of the privacy that we felt when, after 
the opening exercises of the school, our doors 
were closed. But, on the other hand, the 
quiet of the large church, invaded by no hum 
from the schoolroom, was an advantage. 

In this class, teacher and scholars took 
their work in grave earnest, and did during 
the week a large amount of faithful study. 
It was taken for granted that we were all 
interested to discover what there was in the 
lesson that was meant for us as individuals 
and as a class. Different parts having been 
assigned to different groups for research and 
reference, we were certain beforehand that 
the hour would be too brief for all that 
we wished to say. Sometimes a book or 


306 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


paper in which an interesting article or chap- 
ter had been found, or a poem that had some 
relation to the lesson might be brought to 
the class. Visitors were welcome, and occa- 
sionally the teacher changed places for a day 
with a friend in another school that the class 
might have the advantage of a different 
method or another point of view. 

Not the teaching, however, made this class 
ideal so much as the character of those who 
were taught. They were drawn from every 
social station in the community, and there 
was no conscious levelling and no conscious 
looking up. One of the dearest girls in the 
entire fifty was a nurse-maid in charge of 
little children in a household near the church. 
She was of German parentage, spoke English 
imperfectly and had left school before she 
was fourteen. I can never forget the radi- 
ance of her face, the gentleness of her man- 
ner and her sweet responsiveness at the 
name of the Saviour whom she loved and 
served. 

Side by side with her was the daughter of 
a judge, a girl born to the purple, one to 
whom life had been kind from the cradle, 
and who had every advantage of wealth and 
social training. Two or three of the girls 


AN IDEAL BIBLE CLASS 


307 


were teachers in the public schools, others 
were clerks in department stores, others still 
were preparing for college, but all met on 
common ground with a common motive and 
a common aim, in the Sunday-school class. 

From time to time as the sacramental Sun- 
day returned, members of the class gave 
public testimony to their faith in Christ. 
When, as they often did, they met in my 
home on a week evening, there was no stiff- 
ness, and each to each was as a sister. Their 
faces come before me as I write, and as I 
have been able to follow many of them in 
the years that have intervened since we 
parted, I like to think that those who are 
living have fulfilled the sweet promise of 
their youth. There are some who have heard 
the homeland call, and whom I firmly believe 
the Master wanted in higher service than 
He gives to those who tarry here. Of my 
girls, as I always call them, those who re- 
main are busy and useful women, and what- 
ever their circumstances they are true to 
their pledges and illustrate the finest type 
of Christian womanhood. 

We were not satisfied in simply enjoying 
ourselves and studying the Bible in this 
ideal class of mine. Within our circle we 


308 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


organized a missionary society which by a 
happy thought we named The Crystal. Its 
object was to cultivate sympathy with mis- 
sionary effort everywhere. To this end meet- 
ings were held monthly either in the parlor 
of the church or at the homes of the mem- 
bers, and it was my custom to be present on 
every occasion. Indeed, the meetings were 
so full of brightness and enthusiasm that to 
miss them would have been regretted by any 
one enrolled in membership. We had close 
affiliation with the Home Mission work of 
the church and our special foreign oppor- 
tunity was found in the support of a student 
at Ferris Seminary, Yokohama, Japan. 

Nearly thirty years have passed since the 
Crystal Missionary Society first assembled, 
and it has never ceased to carry forward its 
work. There have been successive students 
under its care in Ferris Seminary, and it 
is a gratification to learn that two of its 
Japanese wards have united in a thank offer- 
ing and established a Crystal scholarship in 
their Alma Mater. In a time of stress and 
strain our beloved church, burdened by debt, 
resolved to be rid of that incubus, and the 
matter was taken up at an evening prayer- 
meeting. I had no hesitation, although very 


AN IDEAL BIBLE CLASS 


309 


few of my girls were present, in pledging the 
class to an offering of generous amount. 
When on the next Sunday afternoon I told 
them what I had done they unanimously 
agreed to do more rather than less than I 
had ventured to hope would be within their 
power. 

There exists to-day in this country a mod- 
est society labelled with the cabalistic letters 
T. M. D.S. The uninitiated do not know that 
these letters stand for “ Ten Minutes a Day ” 
and that whoever joins the society promises 
to spend ten minutes of each week day or 
one hour a week in practical Christian work. 
The T. M. D. S. was the bright inspiration of a 
dear girl in the class, and to enumerate all 
that it does and all that it means in its work 
for hospitals, for settlements, for fresh air 
charities is not within my province. The 
society is an organism not an organization. 
It exacts no dues, though it has a treasurer 
and receives and disburses money. Its 
balance-sheet is known in heaven, but is not 
published on earth, and it, too, was the out- 
growth of this ideal Bible class. 

If I know anything of the matter, this 
Bible class, so full of friendliness, so sincerely 
reverent, so anxious to walk in the steps of 


310 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


the Master, illustrated what may be called 
Christian socialism. We thought nothing 
about caste. Every one of us would have 
been humiliated at the idea that so petty a 
thing as a caste line could enter into our 
Eden. Our number was limited to fifty for 
reasons of convenience only. Had there been 
space for our meeting we would gladly have 
had an enrollment of two hundred. The 
stranger in our midst was speedily made to 
feel at home, and if there was one who ap- 
peared ill at ease or whom we imagined had 
a trouble to bear, that one was the object of 
unobtrusive attention and genuine kind- 
ness. 

We adopted each January a motto for the 
year, but the gist of all our mottoes was 
epitomized in “ Whatsoever He saith unto 
you, do it.” Jesus Christ was our personal 
Friend, and the endeavour of our lives was 
to do as we might have done had He been 
visibly in our midst. I cannot doubt that 
His presence and blessing were ours and that 
it was in our trying to follow Him that such 
success as we had was attained. 

These verses were written for the class, and 
in them something of the class spirit finds 
expression. 


AN IDEAL BIBLE CLASS 


311 


God gave me something very sweet to be mine 
own this day : 

A precious opportunity, a word for Christ to say ; 

A soul that my desire might reach, a work to do 
for Him ; 

And now I thank Him for this grace ere yet the 
light grows dim. 

No service that He sends me on can be so wel- 
come aye 

To guide a pilgrim’s weary feet within the nar- 
row way, 

To share the tender Shepherd’s quest, and so by 
brake and fen 

To find for Him His wandering ones, the erring 
sons of men. 

I did not seek this blessed thing ; it came a rare 
surprise, 

Flooding my heart with dearest joy, as, lifting 
wistful eyes, 

Heaven’s light upon a kindling face shone plain 
and clear on mine ; 

And there an unseen third, I felt, was waiting 
One divine. 

So in this twilight hour I kneel, and pour my 
grateful thought 

In song and prayer to Jesus for the gifts this day 
hath brought. 

Sure never service is so sweet, nor life hath so 
much zest, 

As when He bids me speak for Him, and then 
He does the rest. 


When, as I sometimes do, I hear church- 
members speak slightingly of the Sunday- 
school, I regret that they know so little of its 


312 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


value to the church. As well might a family 
scorn the little one, a college ignore the pre- 
paratory school, an army decline to receive 
recruits, as a church of Christ show itself in- 
different to a Bible school for its children. 
Children and young people trained in the 
Sunday-school form the strongest element in 
the stability and aggressiveness of the 
evangelical church. A church that has no 
children of its own, if such there be, should 
go out into the highways and byways and 
gather the children in, not with the feeling 
of patronage and condescension that occa- 
sionally slurs what is called a mission school, 
but on the contrary, with the warm welcome 
bestowed on the children of the home. 
From my ideal Bible class I rejoice to say 
that many excellent Sunday-school teachers 
have gone, and wherever they are the good 
seed of the kingdom by the law of progression 
is being multiplied an hundredfold. 

Removal to another part of Brooklyn and 
a change in church relations compelled me 
to relinquish my charge of the dear class. I 
asked a friend, Mrs. Charles B. Bartram, to 
accept the work that I laid down. In the 
twenty years during which Mrs. Bartram has 
conducted the class it has expanded its scope 


AN IDEAL BIBLE CLASS 


313 


and increased its peculiar usefulness. To- 
day it is inclusive of members whose ages 
range from sixteen to sixty. A contingent 
of young mothers with little children forms 
a delightful feature and, if possible, its spirit 
of Christian altruism is deeper than of old. 
Mrs. Bartram is a brilliant leader, winsome 
and magnetic, and she gathers about her 
earnest and ardent students who seek the 
class from Sunday to Sunday with some- 
thing of the love that clings to home and 
sanctuary. 


XXV 

FRIENDS ALL ALONG THE LINE 

I AM often amused when I hear the 
children talking about their school- 
mates and friends. Girls of fourteen 
and fifteen speak of those a little older with 
an air of condescension. “ Clare will be 
eighteen on her next birthday,” they say, 
and their accent intimates that poor Clare is 
almost hopelessly old. Their teachers are 
usually young women who have been 
recently graduated from college and are 
anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-six, if 
age is to be reckoned by birthdays. The 
teachers seem to the children antique. They 
do not say this, but the thought is there, 
and there it will stay until they learn some- 
thing more in the mysterious book that we 
call Life. 

At seventeen I remember having been ex- 
asperated by the persistent courtesy of a 
man ten years my senior. I thought him 
much too old to be admitted to friendship, 
and great was my surprise when I heard 
314 


FKIENDS ALL ALONG THE LINE 315 


some one speak of him as young. Age and 
youth are relative terms. The great advan- 
tage of the former is that after one has 
reached its tranquil Indian summer, she 
may have friends all along the line. 

One’s dearest friends are presumably those 
who have longest held a place in knowledge 
and acquaintance. Those whom we knew 
when we were young, who have a common 
stock of memories and associations on which 
to draw, a common fund of experience, must 
necessarily hold their own in the fastness of 
our regard. With one friend we shared the 
sorrow that laid life waste in a yesterday 
that blotted out our sunshine. Another was 
with us on our wedding day, and with still 
another we strolled hand in hand through 
the garden and the wood in the idyllic days 
of childhood. Old friends are very precious, 
but we are forced to confess that they are 
by no means the only precious and the 
only essential friends whose names are on 
our muster-roll. 

Friendships are sometimes laid away in 
lavender. We sometimes outgrow friends, 
or the divergent roads of life lead them so 
far away from us that the sense of intimacy 
becomes blunted. An unused tool rusts, so 


316 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


may an unused friendship. After maturity 
we grow indifferent to much in our friends 
that we once thought indispensable. Matu- 
rity may arrive in the bloom of twenty, in 
the glow of fifty, in the serenity of seventy. 
Who can tell when it is attained ? There 
are fruits that ripen early ; there are others 
that need the crisp cold frost to give them 
ripeness. 

The friends who make my life a continual 
joy are many and varied and when I try 
to count their number I am bewildered. 
It is as if I walk, as I often do in dreams, in 
a house where corridor succeeds corridor 
and gallery follows gallery, each hung with 
pictures, not one of which, in dreams at 
least, I could bear to miss. To limit friends 
to the people whose education and training 
resembles one’s own, to limit them to those 
whose creed is identical, to limit them in- 
deed in any way, is a futile and foolish 
thing. 

I have, and I rejoice to say it, a host of 
friends among the young. When, over the 
telephone, as I sit at my desk, a girlish 
voice that I do not know asks me if its 
owner may call because she has visiting her 
a girl from the Pacific coast who has read 


FRIENDS ALL ALONG THE LINE 317 


“ Winsome Womanhood ” and wants to meet 
its author, I am conscious of a pleasure that 
is like a song without words. Blessings on 
the girls ! 

Have I not seen their sweet responsive 
faces in college chapels, in the auditorium of 
Northfield and in the halls of Young 
Woman's Christian Associations ; and has it 
not been a radiance impossible to eclipse to 
have them throng about me while our talk 
fell into the commonplaces of the day and 
the day's work? As I think of my girl 
friends, an ever-increasing multitude, my 
thoughts go farther than this earth and I 
seem to see a ladder rising between earth 
and heaven over which the angels tread. 

How shall I forget one dear girl who used 
to come to me in the Christmas season for 
an hour of pleasant talk, a girl whose every 
moment was filled with love to her Saviour 
and toil for Him, who knew that her life 
here must be short, but who determined that 
it should be full? With a blitheness and 
courage and confident assurance that were 
both simple and heroic this girl confronted 
daily life, and faced the life beyond. She 
comes to me no more in the Christmas sea- 
son, but she is still mine and still as dear as 


318 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ever and far more alive than when last I 
talked with her, and I shall see her again. 
She is but one of many who are friends be- 
yond the sea. 

My most congenial companions, those 
whom I meet oftenest and on whom I de- 
pend for most of cheer and strength are 
young enough to be daughters or grand- 
daughters. Comradeship is delightful when 
the two who walk together enjoy the same 
books, care for the same pursuits and under- 
stand the same jests. A friend who does not 
see the fun of things as you see it may be 
much beloved, but is not your ideal com- 
rade. A love of books, an appreciation of 
humour and a broad embracing charity are 
good foundations for friendship. Intoler- 
ant and critical persons too colour-blind to 
see another’s view-point, or to perceive that 
there may be an opposite side to the shield, 
never remain friends long at a time, and 
are incapable of true friendship. If one de- 
mands all and gives nothing one cannot be 
a real friend. Friendship is built upon reci- 
procity. 

My friend may be in my kitchen, may 
make change for me at a market stall, may 
help me on and off a street-car. In the 


FRIENDS ALL ALONG THE LINE 319 


days when it was my custom to ride often 
in street-cars I had good friends among the 
conductors, most of whom knew me and 
whom I knew. One whom I especially liked 
inquired who was my favourite poet, and 
when I told him that on the whole I thought 
Tennyson was, said, decisively, “ Byron is 
the poet for me.” 

A group of women, who sold newspapers 
at a ferry terminal and wore three-cornered 
shawls pinned over their shoulders, were 
friends with whom I exchanged greetings 
morning and afternoon for nearly a decade. 
They told me in our brief communications 
about their homes and their lives, and I 
knew their trials and triumphs. I was 
stronger in that I knew their affectionate 
prayers were offered for me day by day. 
Unless one makes friends of all sorts, and 
never ceases to add to their number, a time 
will inevitably come when life will be shorn 
of that spice of interest which redeems it 
from dullness. 

I knew a man whose work on a newspaper 
occupied him until long after midnight. He 
sought his home in the gray dawn of the 
morning, and as he genially chatted with 
the deck-hands on the ferry-boat they learned 


320 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


to watch for his coming and confide in him 
as in a friend. One summer he snatched a 
brief holiday across the Atlantic and casually 
mentioned to one of his friends on the boat 
that he would be absent for a while. “ If 
you are going to London,” said the man, 
“ maybe you would take a run to a little 
place not far off and see my mother. I have 
not seen her myself for seven years, but it 
would make her very happy if a gentleman 
like you would tell her that he knew her 
boy in America.” My friend made a note 
of the address, and although his stay in 
England was short, he did not fail to devote 
one day of it to searching out and visiting 
the mother of the deck-hand. Friendship 
can take trouble to give pleasure. In friend- 
ship is inherent the essence of democracy. 

An element of friendship that should not 
be overlooked is its elasticity ; another is its 
privilege of anticipation ; still another is its 
sunny optimism. We believe the best of our 
friends. We are always expecting that at 
the next turn in the road a friend hitherto 
unknown will suddenly step forward with 
outstretched hands. We are willing to allow 
our friends entire liberty to disagree with us 
in matters that are not fundamental. We 


FRIENDS ALL ALONG THE LINE 321 


are not offended at a friend’s vernacular or 
disturbed if a friend dresses oddly or prefers 
a manner of life unlike our own. 

I have friends who wear the quaint garb 
of the Shakers and have spent their lives 
from childhood to old age on a hilltop in 
New York State, seldom going far from the 
boundaries of their little community. From 
these quiet folk messages come to me as 
straight from the heart, as sincere and wel- 
come as others from those who are familiar 
with all that art and science, travel and 
culture can impart. 

When our Lord was about to take leave of 
His disciples He said to them, “ I have not 
called you servants. I have called you 
friends.” In the key-note of our friendship 
with Him we may begin to understand the 
lesser melodies that vibrate through human 
friendship. 

Miss Waring’s familiar lines fit in with 
our thought of friendship’s obligations and of 
the chain that links it to the service of God. 

Father, I know that all my life 
Is portioned out for me ; 

And the changes that must surely come 
I do not fear to see. 

I ask Thee for a present mind 
Intent on pleasing Thee. 


322 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


I ask Thee for a thoughtful love. 

Through constant watching wise, 

To meet the glad with joyful smiles 
And wipe the weeping eyes ; 

And a heart at leisure from itself, 

To sooth and sympathize. 

Wherever in the world I am, 

In whatsoe’er estate, 

I have a fellowship with hearts 
To keep and cultivate ; 

And a work of lowly love to do, 

For the Lord on whom I wait. 

There is a hymn which has for its refrain 
“ Take time to be holy.” I wish there were 
one which should bid us take time to be 
friendly. What with our ocean steamers 
racing from coast to coast in less than five 
days, with our motor-cars speeding at a 
terrific rate and annihilating distance, with 
our flying express trains and the tremendous 
hurry of our lives, we are in danger of sacri- 
ficing friendship on the altar of haste. 
Friendship cannot thrive in the Babel of 
modern drawing-rooms where every one is 
talking at once, and every one is hurrying 
on to keep the next appointment. Friend- 
ship cannot reach its best expression on 
postal cards that have taken the place of the 
four and six page letters that used to burden 


FRIENDS ALL ALONG THE LINE 323 


the mails. If we would have people to love 
us we must take time to reveal our love. 
The Bible tells us that a man that hath 
friends must show himself friendly. 


XXVI 


THE TOUCH OF TIME 
HE touch of time on a moss-grown 



ruin is caressing and decorative. 


Venice and Florence, Dublin and 
Edinburgh, London and Paris surpass the 
cities of our country because they have had 
centuries in which to grow beautiful, while 
we are still so new that our brightness is apt 
to be glaring. A human ruin is less attract- 
ive than the ruin of a bridge, a tower or a 
temple. No doubt this is why most of us 
deprecate the silent advance of the years. 

A woman said to me not long ago as we 
sat together in my country home, “How do 
you like this business of growing old ? For 
myself I hate it.” 

As I looked at her I saw the same dancing 
eyes, the same merry smile, the same elu- 
sive charm that had been hers fifty years 
ago. She had lost neither sight nor hearing, 
and though she was some years past three- 
score and ten, the youth in her was domi- 
nant still. “ Why should you hate it ? ” I 


324 




THE TOUCH OF TIME 


325 


asked. “ You have kept everything that 
was best and parted with little that you 
need regret, so far as you yourself are con- 
cerned.” 

“ You have not answered my question,” she 
insisted. And I was obliged to admit that 
if only Time would let me I would be glad to 
stay where I am since there is no chance of 
going back twenty or thirty or forty years. 
Time is our silent partner in this business of 
growing older in which we all engage. He 
begins to check off our debt to him little by 
little almost from the beginning of life till 
the very end. We are not alarmed by the 
fact that this lifelong partner of ours is 
oftener an antagonist than an ally, because 
his touch on our shoulder is lighter than a 
feather and his foot at our side is as sound- 
less as a snowflake. We slip by impercepti- 
ble degrees from one stage to another, and so 
long as we are able to enjoy and to suffer, 
to love and to sympathize and can do our 
day's task without abatement of vigour, 
mental or physical, we are really young 
whatever masque we may w r ear. 

The first danger-signal that reaches us in 
this progress that we all share is hoisted on 
the day when we are pleased to be told that 


326 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


we look precisely as we did ten years ago. 
This statement is absurd when made to one 
who is twenty-five or thirty. The latter 
landmark indicates for a woman that she 
has arrived at the highest point of develop- 
ment in beauty. Before thirty she is still 
a partially expanded bud, but now she is the 
rose in bloom. The years between thirty 
and forty are so beautiful and fascinating 
that no one can think of herself as other than 
young until she reaches her fortieth year. 
Yet it is in those years of supreme and 
queenly distinction that most women begin 
to regret a little the rounded cheek, the be- 
witching dimples and the delicate complex- 
ion of the girl in her teens. Time, however, 
is their friend and champion, and if he robs 
them of anything it is merely of crudeness. 

At fifty, a twentieth century woman in 
Occidental lands is in the meridian of her 
life's day. She stands at the summit of her 
powers, and if her health and vigour at this 
season be unimpaired, she may confidently 
anticipate a long level stretch of country 
through which she may walk with buoyant 
step. 

For me the years between fifty and sixty 
were spent in editorial work of the most 


THE TOUCH OF TIME 


327 


absorbing nature, and the years after sixty 
have been those in which I have written and 
published a goodly number of books. I find 
in myself to-day the same spring of desire to 
learn all that I can, to read and study that 
has been mine from childhood ; the same 
impulse to undertake the difficult enterprise 
whatever it may be, and the same readiness 
to throw caution overboard and attempt a 
task that requires labour and pains, that I 
have had at any previous moment. I sus- 
pect though that I must be growing older 
because I am so complimented when friends 
assure me that I am looking young. I have 
noted with a faint concern the dawnings in 
myself of resentment when young people 
force me to a seat in a public conveyance on 
the frankly stated ground that they cannot 
permit any one of my age to remain stand- 
ing. 

Eight years ago I exchanged my Brooklyn 
home for one in a pleasant New Jersey 
suburb, and a day or two before I was com- 
pletely settled in my new abode I had an in- 
terview with a cabinet-maker in the neigh- 
bouring village of Bloomfield. The man was 
about to show me something for which I in- 
quired, and said that he would ask me to 


328 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


step up-stairs. I overheard his son, a youth 
of twenty, remonstrating with him sotto voce, 
“ You are not going to ask her to go up-stairs, 
father,” and I was not grateful for his 
thoughtfulness. 

The same shock comes to every one in 
time. When a man, still young but with 
hair turning gray, seeks a business position 
and is told to his surprise that the firm is 
looking for his juniors, he feels for a moment 
that his world is falling to pieces. There are 
professions in which white hairs and length- 
ened years do not count as disabilities. The 
great surgeon continues to be trusted long 
after fifty, the statesman retains his hold on 
the public confidence till he reaches four- 
score, and the famous lawyer commands 
large retainers until he chooses to drop his 
work and retire into private life. Every- 
thing in these cases depends on the personal 
equation. In other departments youth is at 
the helm and age is too often pushed aside 
on the score of feebleness or incompetence. 

Julia Ward Howe celebrated her ninetieth 
birthday a little while ago, and her friends 
rejoice to know that her intellectual force 
remains unimpaired. Harriet Prescott Spof- 
ford, a woman whose grace and loveliness 


THE TOUCH OF TIME 


329 


have only been heightened by the touch of 
Time, writes at seventy-five stories that 
move one to laughter or to tears and is as 
spontaneous, clever and versatile as any 
woman in literature, let her age be what it 
may. 

Edward Everett Hale was in full possession 
of his splendid mental equipment until the 
lamented day of his death at eighty-seven. 

A little while ago I made the usual call of 
courtesy upon a lady who had come to make 
a visit in my neighbourhood. Our little 
borough resembles Mrs. GaskelFs English 
village of Cranford. The men leave it in 
the daytime, and except for the doctor, the 
minister, the station agent and postmaster, 
the place is left to women and children. 
We women regard calling as an important 
duty, and informal afternoon tea as a sacred 
rite. Not to call upon a stranger, not to 
notice the arrival of a friend’s friend is to 
show oneself singular. When I made my 
call there descended to meet me a tall, erect 
and benignant matron who moved into the 
room without hurry, but with ease and dig- 
nity. A friend had accompanied me and 
after a while our conversation turned upon 
the routine of the week, missionary meet- 


330 


FROM MY YOUTH UP 


ings, dinners and assemblies. The lady on 
whom we were calling excused herself from 
accepting an invitation that was pressed 
upon her with the remark, “ When a woman 
has almost reached her ninetieth year she 
cannot do everything that she did when she 
was younger/ * This dear lady reads the 
latest books and discusses them delightfully, 
goes to and from the library to make her 
selections and is as full of interest in current 
happenings as are her granddaughters. 

I recall with gratitude my acquaintance 
with a venerable matron whose home was 
in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She was past 
eighty when I met her and was then writing 
scientific articles for a technical magazine 
and editing a department in the weekly 
newspaper. When she was nearly sixty her 
son, a medical student, lost his eyesight, but 
was able to keep on with his studies because 
his mother took them up and studied with 
him until he successfully passed his exami- 
nations and received his degree. 

The secret of remaining young is not in 
externals ; it lies far deeper. The fountain 
of youth is in the soul. In vain are cosmet- 
ics and dyes and other artifices for the 
cheating of Time. Whoever would grow old 


THE TOUCH OF TIME 


331 


gracefully must do so graciously. To re- 
main receptive to good influences, to keep 
young people about one and share their 
ambitions and hopes, to continue in love 
with love and to go on working steadily pre- 
cisely as in earlier days, these are the recipes 
for being young to one's latest day. 


GEO WING OLD 

Is it parting with the roundness 
Of the smoothly moulded cheek ? 

Is it losing from the dimples 
Half the flashing joy they speak? 

Is it fading of the lustre 
From the wavy golden hair? 

Is it finding on the forehead 
Graven lines of thought and care? 

Is it dropping — as the rose-leaves 
Drop their sweetness, over-blown — 

Household names that once were dearer, 
As familiar as our own ? 

Is it meeting on the pathway 
Faces strange and glances cold, 

While the soul with moan and shiver 
Whispers sadly, 11 Growing old ” ? 

If the smile have gone in deeper, 

And the tear more quickly start, 

Both together meet in music 
Low and tender in the heart ; 

And in others’ joy and gladness 
When the life can find its own, 

Surely angels lean to listen 
To the sweetness of the tone. 


332 


FEOM MY YOUTH UP 


Nothing lost of all we planted 
In the time of budding leaves, 

Only some things bound in bundles 
And set by — our precious sheaves ; 
Only treasure kept in safety 
Out of reach, away from rust, 

Till the future shall restore it, 

Eicher for our present trust. 

On the gradual sloping pathway, 

As the passing years decline, 

Gleams a golden love-light, falling 
Far from upper heights divine ; 
And the shadows from that brightness 
Wrap them softly in their fold, 

Who unto celestial whiteness 
Walk, by way of “growing old.” 


THE END 


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